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The author may have a point but his numeric example is also comparing apples and oranges: > If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the U

by cm2187 7y ago

The author may have a point but his numeric example is also comparing apples and oranges: > If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu He is comparing the number of deaths from a disease to which we are largely immune (the flu, through flu shot or previous strains) to a new disease to which we have no immunity. Of course the number of cases will widely differ. But I think most of the educated people who compare covid 19 to the flu mean in term of IFR, i.e. the ratio of death to the number of people infected. Of course if that ratio is applied to a much greater number of infections you will get more absolute deaths. Also is the way we account for deaths between flu and covid that different? I understand people accounted as covid death don't really die from the virus but from the effects of the virus (pneumonia, heart attack, etc). Isn't the flu killing the same way, and do we do flu tests for each death from pneumonia (or whatever the flu ends up inducing)?

krtong 7y ago
he's just pointing out that nobody writes the flu as the cause of death on a death certificate. The CDC simply releases estimates, while we've been tracking the severity of COVID-19 deaths by asking clinicians to write the cause of death as COVID-19 on the death certificate if they tested positive. Patient has flu and dies of a stroke? Flu can increase the chance of stroke by 50% but the cause of death was the stroke, not the flu. Same thing happens to covid-19? They died of covid-19. The point is that the data collection methods are so different there's no possible way you can really look at the numbers and tell if one kills more than the other.
- cm2187 7y ago
  Your explaination seems sensible but I don't think this was the point that the author made. The way I read it was he meant that the CDC overestimates the number of flu deaths and therefore anyone thinking covid's lethality is comparable to flu is wrong as the flu kills a lot less.

by cm2187 7y ago

krtong 7y ago

he's just pointing out that nobody writes the flu as the cause of death on a death certificate. The CDC simply releases estimates, while we've been tracking the severity of COVID-19 deaths by asking clinicians to write the cause of death as COVID-19 on the death certificate if they tested positive. Patient has flu and dies of a stroke? Flu can increase the chance of stroke by 50% but the cause of death was the stroke, not the flu. Same thing happens to covid-19? They died of covid-19. The point is that the data collection methods are so different there's no possible way you can really look at the numbers and tell if one kills more than the other.

cm2187 7y ago
Your explaination seems sensible but I don't think this was the point that the author made. The way I read it was he meant that the CDC overestimates the number of flu deaths and therefore anyone thinking covid's lethality is comparable to flu is wrong as the flu kills a lot less.