So it's important to note, the CDC does NOT track influenza. I cannot believe how many people are getting this wrong. They track pneumonia deaths. (They do trac

So it's important to note, the CDC does NOT track influenza. I cannot believe how many people are getting this wrong. They track pneumonia deaths. (They do track flu for infants fatalities, but that's a very specific tracking metric that can indicate very bad outbreaks). In 2017/2018, we saw 50k ~ 60k pneumonia deaths. They then go back retroactively and estimate flu (in 2019, it was 20k to 60k). So yes, we're past 50k COVID-19 deaths, but we're comparing three months on something that has an exponential growth and taper to a yearly average. It's not a good comparison. If at the end of the year, COVID-19 deaths are at 70k, you could say it was 20k more than flu .. but keep in mind, the CDC is assigning everything as COVID-19 right now, and New York retroactively added 3,000 suspected deaths, leading to that bizarre one day spike. I did a full write up on this: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/ Working with the data is fucking frustrating right now. Here are my shitty charts: https://covid19data.ml https://covid19data.ml