8 ms·

Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia

54 points by DanBC 6y ago

RickJWagner 6y ago
Interesting that it's not a full year. I wonder if the numbers will be significantly different after more time has passed (i.e. 'the flu season')
bb123 6y ago
This is pretty damming to anyone who claims "its just the flu": “More than three times as many deaths were recorded between January and August this year where COVID-19 was the underlying cause compared to influenza and pneumonia." “The mortality rate for COVID-19 is also significantly higher than influenza and pneumonia rates for both 2020 and the five-year average." “Since 1959, which is when ONS monthly death records began, the number of deaths due to influenza and pneumonia in the first eight months of every year have been lower than the number of COVID-19 deaths seen, so far, in 2020.”
- ryanjshaw 6y ago
  Surely it's much more complicated than this? Assuming the COVID-19 assigned deaths are accurately labelled, how many COVID-19 deaths would have been pneumonia/influenza deaths? How many pneumonia/influenza deaths from 2021, 2022, ... have been brought forward to 2020? How much has the lockdown contributed to poor immune systems? Which age groups are affected more, were they already at life expectancy? It's obviously not the flu but it seems clear it will be years before we understand what the impact really is.
  - MrsPeaches 6y ago
    From TFA: "The analysis of COVID-19, influenza and pneumonia deaths in this bulletin focuses on deaths where these conditions were the underlying cause of death (deaths “due to”), rather than deaths where the conditions were either the underlying cause or mentioned as a contributing factor (deaths “involving”). Data for deaths where COVID-19, influenza and pneumonia were a contributing factor are available in the accompanying dataset." They also point to this document for more details: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/methodologies/userguidetomortalitystatisticsjuly2017 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
    - ryanjshaw 6y ago
      I made a number of points and I'm not sure which point this quote is meant to address as it doesn't appear to address any of them? There is no way to know if somebody would have died from the flu/pneumonia if they didn't first die from COVID-19. Excess death calculations provide a hint but are confounded by additional variables created by the lockdown (eg people not getting exercise, not getting checkups, not eating as well, depression, etc.) Furthermore excess death calculations can only take into account < one year of data at present. We don't know if it takes off 0.5, 1, 2, 3 or more years of your life expectancy ie. would you likely have died of a respiratory illness in 2021, 2022, etc. - these are important questions, I've seen estimates saying 8 years - which is a very compelling argument for lockdown - but would 0.5 or 1 year have the same gravity?
- chrisco255 6y ago
  The number of deaths from flu, pneumonia, and Covid are about 50% higher than the year 2000 (Jan-Aug) and about 25% higher than the year 1983. Do those numbers justify draconian shutdowns and bankrupting half of humanity? I'm not so sure. In the early days, we believed that Covid was 10-20 times deadlier than the flu, and that's what was used to justify the draconian measures. Note also these numbers are for the UK, one of the top worst countries hit in terms of deaths per million in the world. Also, Covid does not seem to have the same seasonality that the flu has, which peaks in cold winter months. It may therefore not be altogether accurate to merely compare Jan-Aug. We may need the whole year's data to better compare.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - titzer 6y ago
    > In the early days, we believed that Covid was 10-20 times deadlier than the flu, and that's what was used to justify the draconian measures. I'm looking at this [1] data, Table 4, specifically the row for April. Deaths in April Pneumonia+Influenza, 5yr avg: 2,354.8 Pneumonia+Influenza, 2020: 1,933 COVID: 29,128 [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=%2fpeoplepopulationandcommunity%2fbirthsdeathsandmarriages%2fdeaths%2fdatasets%2fdeathsduetocovid19comparedwithdeathsfrominfluenzaandpneumonia%2fdeathsoccurringbetween1januaryand31august2020/referencetables2.xlsx https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=%2fpeoplepopulationandcommun... April was peak, pre-lockdown, full-blown pandemic conditions. That's a 12x difference. Bad. Shit.
    - _-___________-_ 6y ago
      The influenza season in the UK is typically October-May with the peak period December-March. So the 2020 number for influenza is a bit flawed given that it's missing 25% of the typical peak period and 3/8 of the whole influenza season.
- titzer 6y ago
  Just look at the daily and monthly numbers. April was absolutely horrific, with daily deaths spiking at 15x and April at more than 10x. Lockdowns flattened the curve, care improved, mask wearing improved, and overall better hygiene, particularly at nursing homes. The overall death rate is going down because the age demographic of infection has changed as well. Basically, it's hitting more younger people and older people are taking more precautions. COVID is not to be trifled with.
  - logicchains 6y ago
    >Lockdowns flattened the curve, care improved, mask wearing improved, and overall better hygiene, particularly at nursing homes. Comparing places with and without lockdowns there's actually little evidence that lockdowns led to a reduction in mortality: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/social-distancing-more-important-than-lockdowns-in-covid-19-fight-tau-644754 https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/social-distancing-more-imp.... What was associated with a reduction in mortality was social distancing.
    - loopz 6y ago
      Lockdown was due to being unprepared. It's a long time since nearly all nations opened up again, though measures vary wildly and is researched on.
    - titzer 6y ago
      This is a really difficult causal inference to make. There are so many confounding variables, from quality of healthcare to age demographic of infection, etc. It's also noisy. A nursing home getting infected and many older folks dying can completely spike the numbers. So I pretty much don't trust their statistics, especially if they are reporting 3 significant figures like "7.49 days doubling the number of fatalities". Even just misaligning the starts of the exponential growth phase of curves (does it begin at 1 case per 100k, 5, 100?) can throw this way off.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  The confusion lies in "just the flu". Actual Influenza is in fact quite dangerous. However, we need to compare COVID-19 to Influenza to get some perspective. I would argue that Influenza is worse than COVID, for the simple reason that it kills more young people and children. The average age of a COVID fatality is higher than life expectancy. Influenza destroys more years of life. We also need to make a distinction between the time frame in which the virus was new and killed a disproportionate amount of susceptible people, versus the time frame we are in now, where the virus is once again kills less people than Influenza - as the data clearly shows, though it isn't highlighted in the publication.
  - collyw 6y ago
    > Actual Influenza is in fact quite dangerous. Agreed, but we don't destroy economies over it, we just get on with things and accept it for what it is.
    - AstralStorm 6y ago
      Except influenza is nowhere near spreading as fast. If let unchecked, many millions of people would be dead - this has been avoided only by control measures, and we're not past it yet. If it's similar seasonality to Spanish flu, expect 4 waves. This is start of the second wave, likely biggest.
      - gridlockd 6y ago
        > If let unchecked, many millions of people would be dead - this has been avoided only by control measures, and we're not past it yet. This is an unfalsifiable claim, considering that virtually every country has done something to inhibit spread. It's also meaningless, because nobody is saying that nothing should be done to inhibit spread. The question is, what should be done? How many people-years can we realistically save, and at what cost? Every year, almost 3 million Americans will die of any cause. If we take a CFR of 0.4%, and a "herd immunity" threshold of 70%, the upper bound of deaths in the US from COVID-19 is under a million. The average age of a COVID-19 fatality is higher than life expectancy, which means that half of these deaths would've occured under any circumstance, in the near future. We can see high excess mortality right now, but we haven't seen how that translates into lowered mortality in the future.
- rimliu 6y ago
  > This is pretty damming to anyone who claims "its just > the flu" Any discussion about the COVID deaths that does not take age into account is not worth the time. For the younger population it may actually look better than the flu.
  - funcDropShadow 6y ago
    But we need rules for the benefits of the society as whole not just for teens.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    Most of "the younger population" you refer to doesn't live isolated away from everyone else, so their own personal health isn't the only factor to consider.
- sdfkkksdfsdff 6y ago
  How did they determine the numbers?
born_a_skeptic 6y ago
I'm not a statistician or a scientist, but I don't it does any good to lump everything together over the past ~9 months and compare it to Influenza and Pneumonia. Just think about it. We barely knew anything about covid or how to treat it at the start of the year. Now, it seems like we have a better understanding and how to potentially treat it. Compare this to Influenza/Pneumonia, which I'm just guessing we've been studying for much longer and already have treatments for. You could probably add some sort of moving average 50 days and 200 days to provide a clearer picture of how we are currently doing.
- tremon 6y ago
  I don't think you can lump everything together Why not? Do you think the number of previously recorded deaths will suddenly decrease because we've found a better treatment? These people died, they should be included in the statistics.
  - born_a_skeptic 6y ago
    I edited my comment. I could have been more clear. I should have added that I think it depends on what the creator of the graphics/information is trying to show. If it's a pure death rate comparison, then sure you could lump everything together. However, if you want to show a more real-time comparison, you choose to segment the data based on time.
  - piokoch 6y ago
    I think the point here is that once we learned how to handle Covid, it will not be more dangerous than flu. The main question for me is if someone who got Covid and recovered can get sick again. I haven't seen any answer for that question I could trust. There are some headlines from time to time "got Covid again after recovery", but given the quality of media reporting it means nothing.
- noobermin 6y ago
  Why make this point and ask for a moving average? The fact that it is new and unknown is part of why it is deadly, and that is reflected in the statistics. Why try to erase one takeaways from this set of statistics?
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
This chart from Sweden says its not worse than influenza: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ejd0IpdVcAASTqR?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ejd0IpdVcAASTqR?format=jpg&name=... Looking at the source data, the numbers seem roughly right: https://knoema.de/atlas/Schweden/Sterblichkeitsrate https://knoema.de/atlas/Schweden/Sterblichkeitsrate I don't know what to think anymore.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  Doesn't seem right to me. Euromomo does show a bump for Sweden, though it is still smaller than some other countries that did lockdowns: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps Also, several countries show no excess mortality.
  - evgen 6y ago
    Compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors like Norway, Finland, and Denmark and the cost of Sweden's failed response becomes pretty obvious.
    - rimliu 6y ago
      Compare the last few years then. Sweden did not have a bad flu seasons unlike the neighbours, who did.
    - narrator 6y ago
      They didn't have to shut down the country though and since August there's 6 or less deaths a day. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
      - ginko 6y ago
        Norway has a death every 3 days or so right now.
    - UrsaMedius 6y ago
gridlockd 6y ago
Some things to consider from looking at the raw data: The 5-year average minimum of deaths from "Influenza and pneumonia" is about 50 cases per day. The average for 2020 is about half that. Adding up COVID fatalities and "Influeanza and pneumonia" after July comes to about 50 cases per day. In other words, there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  > there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July Correct, and that correlates neatly with the number of recorded cases of covid19. One could even draw the conclusion that if less people have covid-19, less people are likely to die from it.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    The death rate has plummeted not merely the infection rate. Even where "second waves" are occurring around Europe the death rate for this second wave is substantially lower. https://metro.co.uk/2020/09/20/second-wave-of-cases-not-causing-deaths-to-spike-in-europe-13299232/ https://metro.co.uk/2020/09/20/second-wave-of-cases-not-caus...
    - KaiserPro 6y ago
      yes, from this we can conclude one of two things: 1) covid is causing less acute problems 2) The percentage of daily tests that are positive is much lower, meaning that there are nowhere near as many uncounted cases in the wild. I know which my money is on. Its also easy to prove.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    > Correct, and that correlates neatly with the number of recorded cases of covid19. Not quite. The number of recorded cases in the UK from one month ago is equal to the number of recorded cases at the height of the first wave, yet the fatalities are 10x lower. I do expect excess mortality due to COVID-19 in the coming months, but not to the same extent as during the first wave. We need to re-evaluate the risk profile based on those numbers, not the numbers of the first wave. > One could even draw the conclusion that if less people have covid-19, less people are likely to die from it. One could also draw the conclusion that the more people have already died from COVID-19, the less people are likely to die from it in the future, because fewer susceptible people remain in the pool. Unlike with Influenza, it takes many decades of lifetime to develop a serious risk of dying from COVID.
fabian2k 6y ago
I think it is important to keep in mind that Covid-19 is still contained to some extent due to various measures. The influenza numbers are for the most part without any behaviour changes or rules (the influenza season ended roughly when Covid started to spread). The Covid-19 deaths would be higher if it were able to spread unhindered through the entire population. And even in this somewhat unfair comparison Covid caused three times as many deaths.
- prox 6y ago
  It’s also contained because unleashing it would totally overwhelm almost any nation’s hospitals, cause a cascading death toll because no treatment could be given.
  - logicchains 6y ago
    >It’s also contained because unleashing it would totally overwhelm almost any nation’s hospitals, cause a cascading death toll because no treatment could be given. This is clearly not true because it didn't overwhelm Sweden's hospitals, or Japan's, or South Dakota's, even though they didn't have lockdowns, just voluntary social distancing.
    - fabian2k 6y ago
      I intentionally mentioned behaviour changes first in my comment, we can't fully separate rules and lockdowns from voluntary behavioural changes. In the end all that matters is the changed behaviour, not whether it was enforced or not. Full lockdowns are also not the best way to handle increasing numbers now, they were necessary earlier this year because we didn't know much about the virus and which situations are the most dangerous. With the knowledge we have today we can use more specific interventions to contain the virus.
    - martyvis 6y ago
      Japan has a culture of wearing masks when conditions prevail (normally pollution related but also disease). They also tend to be not into physical contact in social settings, and are more likely to be in compliance to societal laws.
eithed 6y ago
Shouldn't the comparisons be based from percentages? Also - even with that I'd assume that the more the people, the more dynamic world we live in then the rate of transmission will increase (then the more deaths)
lwansbrough 6y ago
Very difficult to compare this data. Flu deaths will be down this year because of all the additional precautions taken around transmission, which may disproportionately affect flu virality (ie. perhaps COVID still manages to transmit despite precautions while flu does not.) Then if you say okay compare a previous flu year, you’d have to compare with the same conditions, which in a typical year would be no masks, barriers, social distancing, etc. And I think we all know how much worse COVID would be if we weren’t taking any precautions - we were warned for months about it. So I’d imagine the initial observations that COVID is about 3-4x as deadly as the flu (and not 10x+ as some of these numbers suggest) are probably accurate enough.
_bax 6y ago
No data from Ch1na?
_-___________-_ 6y ago
While interpreting this it's worth noting that the influenza season in the UK is typically October-May with the peak period December-March. So the 2020 numbers for influenza are missing 25% of the typical peak period and 3/8 of the whole influenza season.
sdfkkksdfsdff 6y ago
So did they test every dying person on influenza, and if they died, cause of death was "influenza"? What if they tested positive for both influenza and Covid-19, what cause would be listed? I'm just not convinced the comparison is very meaningful, as I suspect many more people were tested for Covid-19 than for influenza. The testing strategy may have been completely different, making the comparison meaningless.
anotherevan 6y ago
Even just comparing total number of deaths this year to last year is pretty gruesome. From the same website as the original article - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending25september2020 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... - the second last paragraph of section 2 reads: "Looking at the year-to-date (using the most up-to-date data we have available), the number of deaths up to 25 September 2020 was 453,771, which is 53,888 more than the five-year average." That’s just in England and Wales.

54 points by DanBC 6y ago

Interesting that it's not a full year. I wonder if the numbers will be significantly different after more time has passed (i.e. 'the flu season')

bb123 6y ago

This is pretty damming to anyone who claims "its just the flu": “More than three times as many deaths were recorded between January and August this year where COVID-19 was the underlying cause compared to influenza and pneumonia." “The mortality rate for COVID-19 is also significantly higher than influenza and pneumonia rates for both 2020 and the five-year average." “Since 1959, which is when ONS monthly death records began, the number of deaths due to influenza and pneumonia in the first eight months of every year have been lower than the number of COVID-19 deaths seen, so far, in 2020.”

ryanjshaw 6y ago
Surely it's much more complicated than this? Assuming the COVID-19 assigned deaths are accurately labelled, how many COVID-19 deaths would have been pneumonia/influenza deaths? How many pneumonia/influenza deaths from 2021, 2022, ... have been brought forward to 2020? How much has the lockdown contributed to poor immune systems? Which age groups are affected more, were they already at life expectancy? It's obviously not the flu but it seems clear it will be years before we understand what the impact really is.
- MrsPeaches 6y ago
  From TFA: "The analysis of COVID-19, influenza and pneumonia deaths in this bulletin focuses on deaths where these conditions were the underlying cause of death (deaths “due to”), rather than deaths where the conditions were either the underlying cause or mentioned as a contributing factor (deaths “involving”). Data for deaths where COVID-19, influenza and pneumonia were a contributing factor are available in the accompanying dataset." They also point to this document for more details: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/methodologies/userguidetomortalitystatisticsjuly2017 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
  - ryanjshaw 6y ago
    I made a number of points and I'm not sure which point this quote is meant to address as it doesn't appear to address any of them? There is no way to know if somebody would have died from the flu/pneumonia if they didn't first die from COVID-19. Excess death calculations provide a hint but are confounded by additional variables created by the lockdown (eg people not getting exercise, not getting checkups, not eating as well, depression, etc.) Furthermore excess death calculations can only take into account < one year of data at present. We don't know if it takes off 0.5, 1, 2, 3 or more years of your life expectancy ie. would you likely have died of a respiratory illness in 2021, 2022, etc. - these are important questions, I've seen estimates saying 8 years - which is a very compelling argument for lockdown - but would 0.5 or 1 year have the same gravity?
chrisco255 6y ago
The number of deaths from flu, pneumonia, and Covid are about 50% higher than the year 2000 (Jan-Aug) and about 25% higher than the year 1983. Do those numbers justify draconian shutdowns and bankrupting half of humanity? I'm not so sure. In the early days, we believed that Covid was 10-20 times deadlier than the flu, and that's what was used to justify the draconian measures. Note also these numbers are for the UK, one of the top worst countries hit in terms of deaths per million in the world. Also, Covid does not seem to have the same seasonality that the flu has, which peaks in cold winter months. It may therefore not be altogether accurate to merely compare Jan-Aug. We may need the whole year's data to better compare.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- titzer 6y ago
  > In the early days, we believed that Covid was 10-20 times deadlier than the flu, and that's what was used to justify the draconian measures. I'm looking at this [1] data, Table 4, specifically the row for April. Deaths in April Pneumonia+Influenza, 5yr avg: 2,354.8 Pneumonia+Influenza, 2020: 1,933 COVID: 29,128 [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=%2fpeoplepopulationandcommunity%2fbirthsdeathsandmarriages%2fdeaths%2fdatasets%2fdeathsduetocovid19comparedwithdeathsfrominfluenzaandpneumonia%2fdeathsoccurringbetween1januaryand31august2020/referencetables2.xlsx https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=%2fpeoplepopulationandcommun... April was peak, pre-lockdown, full-blown pandemic conditions. That's a 12x difference. Bad. Shit.
  - _-___________-_ 6y ago
    The influenza season in the UK is typically October-May with the peak period December-March. So the 2020 number for influenza is a bit flawed given that it's missing 25% of the typical peak period and 3/8 of the whole influenza season.
titzer 6y ago
Just look at the daily and monthly numbers. April was absolutely horrific, with daily deaths spiking at 15x and April at more than 10x. Lockdowns flattened the curve, care improved, mask wearing improved, and overall better hygiene, particularly at nursing homes. The overall death rate is going down because the age demographic of infection has changed as well. Basically, it's hitting more younger people and older people are taking more precautions. COVID is not to be trifled with.
- logicchains 6y ago
  >Lockdowns flattened the curve, care improved, mask wearing improved, and overall better hygiene, particularly at nursing homes. Comparing places with and without lockdowns there's actually little evidence that lockdowns led to a reduction in mortality: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/social-distancing-more-important-than-lockdowns-in-covid-19-fight-tau-644754 https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/social-distancing-more-imp.... What was associated with a reduction in mortality was social distancing.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Lockdown was due to being unprepared. It's a long time since nearly all nations opened up again, though measures vary wildly and is researched on.
  - titzer 6y ago
    This is a really difficult causal inference to make. There are so many confounding variables, from quality of healthcare to age demographic of infection, etc. It's also noisy. A nursing home getting infected and many older folks dying can completely spike the numbers. So I pretty much don't trust their statistics, especially if they are reporting 3 significant figures like "7.49 days doubling the number of fatalities". Even just misaligning the starts of the exponential growth phase of curves (does it begin at 1 case per 100k, 5, 100?) can throw this way off.
gridlockd 6y ago
The confusion lies in "just the flu". Actual Influenza is in fact quite dangerous. However, we need to compare COVID-19 to Influenza to get some perspective. I would argue that Influenza is worse than COVID, for the simple reason that it kills more young people and children. The average age of a COVID fatality is higher than life expectancy. Influenza destroys more years of life. We also need to make a distinction between the time frame in which the virus was new and killed a disproportionate amount of susceptible people, versus the time frame we are in now, where the virus is once again kills less people than Influenza - as the data clearly shows, though it isn't highlighted in the publication.
- collyw 6y ago
  > Actual Influenza is in fact quite dangerous. Agreed, but we don't destroy economies over it, we just get on with things and accept it for what it is.
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    Except influenza is nowhere near spreading as fast. If let unchecked, many millions of people would be dead - this has been avoided only by control measures, and we're not past it yet. If it's similar seasonality to Spanish flu, expect 4 waves. This is start of the second wave, likely biggest.
    - gridlockd 6y ago
      > If let unchecked, many millions of people would be dead - this has been avoided only by control measures, and we're not past it yet. This is an unfalsifiable claim, considering that virtually every country has done something to inhibit spread. It's also meaningless, because nobody is saying that nothing should be done to inhibit spread. The question is, what should be done? How many people-years can we realistically save, and at what cost? Every year, almost 3 million Americans will die of any cause. If we take a CFR of 0.4%, and a "herd immunity" threshold of 70%, the upper bound of deaths in the US from COVID-19 is under a million. The average age of a COVID-19 fatality is higher than life expectancy, which means that half of these deaths would've occured under any circumstance, in the near future. We can see high excess mortality right now, but we haven't seen how that translates into lowered mortality in the future.
rimliu 6y ago
> This is pretty damming to anyone who claims "its just > the flu" Any discussion about the COVID deaths that does not take age into account is not worth the time. For the younger population it may actually look better than the flu.
- funcDropShadow 6y ago
  But we need rules for the benefits of the society as whole not just for teens.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  Most of "the younger population" you refer to doesn't live isolated away from everyone else, so their own personal health isn't the only factor to consider.
sdfkkksdfsdff 6y ago
How did they determine the numbers?

born_a_skeptic 6y ago

I'm not a statistician or a scientist, but I don't it does any good to lump everything together over the past ~9 months and compare it to Influenza and Pneumonia. Just think about it. We barely knew anything about covid or how to treat it at the start of the year. Now, it seems like we have a better understanding and how to potentially treat it. Compare this to Influenza/Pneumonia, which I'm just guessing we've been studying for much longer and already have treatments for. You could probably add some sort of moving average 50 days and 200 days to provide a clearer picture of how we are currently doing.

tremon 6y ago
I don't think you can lump everything together Why not? Do you think the number of previously recorded deaths will suddenly decrease because we've found a better treatment? These people died, they should be included in the statistics.
- born_a_skeptic 6y ago
  I edited my comment. I could have been more clear. I should have added that I think it depends on what the creator of the graphics/information is trying to show. If it's a pure death rate comparison, then sure you could lump everything together. However, if you want to show a more real-time comparison, you choose to segment the data based on time.
- piokoch 6y ago
  I think the point here is that once we learned how to handle Covid, it will not be more dangerous than flu. The main question for me is if someone who got Covid and recovered can get sick again. I haven't seen any answer for that question I could trust. There are some headlines from time to time "got Covid again after recovery", but given the quality of media reporting it means nothing.
noobermin 6y ago
Why make this point and ask for a moving average? The fact that it is new and unknown is part of why it is deadly, and that is reflected in the statistics. Why try to erase one takeaways from this set of statistics?

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago

This chart from Sweden says its not worse than influenza: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ejd0IpdVcAASTqR?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ejd0IpdVcAASTqR?format=jpg&name=... Looking at the source data, the numbers seem roughly right: https://knoema.de/atlas/Schweden/Sterblichkeitsrate https://knoema.de/atlas/Schweden/Sterblichkeitsrate I don't know what to think anymore.

gridlockd 6y ago
Doesn't seem right to me. Euromomo does show a bump for Sweden, though it is still smaller than some other countries that did lockdowns: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps Also, several countries show no excess mortality.
- evgen 6y ago
  Compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors like Norway, Finland, and Denmark and the cost of Sweden's failed response becomes pretty obvious.
  - rimliu 6y ago
    Compare the last few years then. Sweden did not have a bad flu seasons unlike the neighbours, who did.
  - narrator 6y ago
    They didn't have to shut down the country though and since August there's 6 or less deaths a day. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
    - ginko 6y ago
      Norway has a death every 3 days or so right now.
  - UrsaMedius 6y ago

gridlockd 6y ago

Some things to consider from looking at the raw data: The 5-year average minimum of deaths from "Influenza and pneumonia" is about 50 cases per day. The average for 2020 is about half that. Adding up COVID fatalities and "Influeanza and pneumonia" after July comes to about 50 cases per day. In other words, there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July.

KaiserPro 6y ago
> there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July Correct, and that correlates neatly with the number of recorded cases of covid19. One could even draw the conclusion that if less people have covid-19, less people are likely to die from it.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  The death rate has plummeted not merely the infection rate. Even where "second waves" are occurring around Europe the death rate for this second wave is substantially lower. https://metro.co.uk/2020/09/20/second-wave-of-cases-not-causing-deaths-to-spike-in-europe-13299232/ https://metro.co.uk/2020/09/20/second-wave-of-cases-not-caus...
  - KaiserPro 6y ago
    yes, from this we can conclude one of two things: 1) covid is causing less acute problems 2) The percentage of daily tests that are positive is much lower, meaning that there are nowhere near as many uncounted cases in the wild. I know which my money is on. Its also easy to prove.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  > Correct, and that correlates neatly with the number of recorded cases of covid19. Not quite. The number of recorded cases in the UK from one month ago is equal to the number of recorded cases at the height of the first wave, yet the fatalities are 10x lower. I do expect excess mortality due to COVID-19 in the coming months, but not to the same extent as during the first wave. We need to re-evaluate the risk profile based on those numbers, not the numbers of the first wave. > One could even draw the conclusion that if less people have covid-19, less people are likely to die from it. One could also draw the conclusion that the more people have already died from COVID-19, the less people are likely to die from it in the future, because fewer susceptible people remain in the pool. Unlike with Influenza, it takes many decades of lifetime to develop a serious risk of dying from COVID.

fabian2k 6y ago

I think it is important to keep in mind that Covid-19 is still contained to some extent due to various measures. The influenza numbers are for the most part without any behaviour changes or rules (the influenza season ended roughly when Covid started to spread). The Covid-19 deaths would be higher if it were able to spread unhindered through the entire population. And even in this somewhat unfair comparison Covid caused three times as many deaths.

prox 6y ago
It’s also contained because unleashing it would totally overwhelm almost any nation’s hospitals, cause a cascading death toll because no treatment could be given.
- logicchains 6y ago
  >It’s also contained because unleashing it would totally overwhelm almost any nation’s hospitals, cause a cascading death toll because no treatment could be given. This is clearly not true because it didn't overwhelm Sweden's hospitals, or Japan's, or South Dakota's, even though they didn't have lockdowns, just voluntary social distancing.
  - fabian2k 6y ago
    I intentionally mentioned behaviour changes first in my comment, we can't fully separate rules and lockdowns from voluntary behavioural changes. In the end all that matters is the changed behaviour, not whether it was enforced or not. Full lockdowns are also not the best way to handle increasing numbers now, they were necessary earlier this year because we didn't know much about the virus and which situations are the most dangerous. With the knowledge we have today we can use more specific interventions to contain the virus.
  - martyvis 6y ago
    Japan has a culture of wearing masks when conditions prevail (normally pollution related but also disease). They also tend to be not into physical contact in social settings, and are more likely to be in compliance to societal laws.

eithed 6y ago

Shouldn't the comparisons be based from percentages? Also - even with that I'd assume that the more the people, the more dynamic world we live in then the rate of transmission will increase (then the more deaths)

lwansbrough 6y ago

Very difficult to compare this data. Flu deaths will be down this year because of all the additional precautions taken around transmission, which may disproportionately affect flu virality (ie. perhaps COVID still manages to transmit despite precautions while flu does not.) Then if you say okay compare a previous flu year, you’d have to compare with the same conditions, which in a typical year would be no masks, barriers, social distancing, etc. And I think we all know how much worse COVID would be if we weren’t taking any precautions - we were warned for months about it. So I’d imagine the initial observations that COVID is about 3-4x as deadly as the flu (and not 10x+ as some of these numbers suggest) are probably accurate enough.

_bax 6y ago

No data from Ch1na?

_-___________-_ 6y ago

While interpreting this it's worth noting that the influenza season in the UK is typically October-May with the peak period December-March. So the 2020 numbers for influenza are missing 25% of the typical peak period and 3/8 of the whole influenza season.

sdfkkksdfsdff 6y ago

So did they test every dying person on influenza, and if they died, cause of death was "influenza"? What if they tested positive for both influenza and Covid-19, what cause would be listed? I'm just not convinced the comparison is very meaningful, as I suspect many more people were tested for Covid-19 than for influenza. The testing strategy may have been completely different, making the comparison meaningless.

anotherevan 6y ago

Even just comparing total number of deaths this year to last year is pretty gruesome. From the same website as the original article - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending25september2020 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... - the second last paragraph of section 2 reads: "Looking at the year-to-date (using the most up-to-date data we have available), the number of deaths up to 25 September 2020 was 453,771, which is 53,888 more than the five-year average." That’s just in England and Wales.