4 ms·

I heard a handful of first hand accounts of weird, extra-severe flu-like illnesses from coworkers/friends over last 9 months, but what gets me is that mortality

I heard a handful of first hand accounts of weird, extra-severe flu-like illnesses from coworkers/friends over last 9 months, but what gets me is that mortality anomalies only started in what, late Feb? That's what I can't square away with the anecdotes.

pfundstein 6y ago
How do you know that they weren't attributed to the flu or complications thereof?
- SamBam 6y ago
  Because when you look at the excess deaths charts [1], there's nothing at all surprising before mid-March. Then from mid-March onwards, deaths (from all causes) go through the roof. So there simply wasn't any death toll before mid-March that suggests at all that the virus could have been spreading much earlier. Likewise, we would have seen the hospitals becoming overwhelmed earlier. Any unchecked spread in the fall or January would have caused those charts to have started spiking much earlier. There's no evidence for earlier community spread, and good evidence against it. You can't have a virus that can spread widely, and only later turn on its lethality. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronavirus-death-toll-total.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronaviru...
baddox 6y ago
How good is your memory of first-hand accounts of weird, extra-severe flu-like illnesses from coworkers and friends in previous years? One possibility is that people get weird severe flu-like illnesses fairly regularly (perhaps every few years for most people), and they recount those experiences to their coworkers and friends, and no one thinks much of it until there is a global pandemic of a respiratory illness. I can only recall one such illness that I experienced. I was in college living on campus, and I felt like I had been hit by a truck for 2 days before I made it to the campus clinic. I tested positive for influenza, but if I hadn’t, and this pandemic had happened 6 months later, I almost certainly would have been tempted to attribute it as one of these supposed extremely early cases.

pfundstein 6y ago

How do you know that they weren't attributed to the flu or complications thereof?

SamBam 6y ago
Because when you look at the excess deaths charts [1], there's nothing at all surprising before mid-March. Then from mid-March onwards, deaths (from all causes) go through the roof. So there simply wasn't any death toll before mid-March that suggests at all that the virus could have been spreading much earlier. Likewise, we would have seen the hospitals becoming overwhelmed earlier. Any unchecked spread in the fall or January would have caused those charts to have started spiking much earlier. There's no evidence for earlier community spread, and good evidence against it. You can't have a virus that can spread widely, and only later turn on its lethality. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronavirus-death-toll-total.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronaviru...

baddox 6y ago

How good is your memory of first-hand accounts of weird, extra-severe flu-like illnesses from coworkers and friends in previous years? One possibility is that people get weird severe flu-like illnesses fairly regularly (perhaps every few years for most people), and they recount those experiences to their coworkers and friends, and no one thinks much of it until there is a global pandemic of a respiratory illness. I can only recall one such illness that I experienced. I was in college living on campus, and I felt like I had been hit by a truck for 2 days before I made it to the campus clinic. I tested positive for influenza, but if I hadn’t, and this pandemic had happened 6 months later, I almost certainly would have been tempted to attribute it as one of these supposed extremely early cases.