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This is a debunked claim that arose from conflating IFR vs CFR. Please source your claim. In terms of overall IFR Influenza and COVID-19 appear to be comparabl
by __blockcipher__ 6y ago
This is a debunked claim that arose from conflating IFR vs CFR. Please source your claim.
In terms of overall IFR Influenza and COVID-19 appear to be comparable. Influenza kills at least an order of magnitude more children, and for those in between roughly 35-55 they both kill about the same, and for the very elderly COVID-19 is multiple times more deadly.
The overall IFRs are very comprable except COVID-19 preferentially kills the very old. This also means when you calculate YLL (years of life lost) Influenza takes more life-years away.
I’d say at most if you take a .1% IFR of Influenza then COVID-19 is about 3x as deadly. Note however that we fundamentally classify Influenza deaths differently than with COVID-19. Almost any country considers any PCR-positive person who dies to be a COVID-19 death regardless of whether it’s a baby born with intestines outside of its body, or a young man in Orange County who died in a motorcycle accident, or George Floyd. All 3 of those examples I gave are real individuals who were PCR-positive at time of death. I know for a fact that the first two were initially labelled COVID-19 deaths, not sure about Floyd.
There’s a concept I call the pathological vs physiologixal distinction that is crucial to understand and has been totally violated with COVID—19. The short of it is that it is a mistake to confuse a virus with a disease. (This is also why the phrase “asymptomatic COVID-19” is an oxymoron; if you have no symptoms you have a virus but not a disease)
I have acne; if you culture my skin you will find the bacteria C. Acnes, which is naively believed to “cause” acne. Yet if you culture the skin of a healthy individual without acne, they also have C. Acnes. The question then is what combination of factors leads C Acnes to be pathogenic in one case (me) and not for another. The answer like most things is complicated, some combination of lipid peroxidation compromising the skin barrier, genetic skin turnover rates, etc, but most pop-sci articles will simplify it to “bacteria cause acne”.
Similarly, it is a mistake to assume that if someone dies and has a positive SARS-2 PCR test that they died of COVID. First of all due to egregiously absurd cycle thresholds, you stay PCR-positive months after infection (again, see George Floyd’s hennepin county autopsy, he “had COVID” despite having recovered from it over a month prior to his death). But more importantly even if you truly have active, replicating SARS-2 in you at time of death, you didn’t necessarily die from COVID.
I really got off on a tangent there but to wrap up, even if you take the official COVID-19 numbers - which I believe are grossly inflated - at most COVID-19 is 3x as lethal. To say it is an order of magnitude more deadly means you’re still stuck in April. It’s October now, please follow the new developments in the field. There was actually a paper released recently that traces the origins of the 10x deadly meme, debunked it and attributed its genesis to conflating CFR vs IFR. I’m on mobile travelling now without my laptop so I don’t have my megalist of research articles at my fingertips but if you search around maybe you can find it.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThis is trivially disproven by the excess mortality figures from earlier in the year. By the start of the Summer the UK had around 60,000 excess deaths above the five year median - which included at least one fairly severe flu season. Later in the Summer when lockdown was still in place and/or infection rates were still very controlled, the number of excess deaths dipped slightly below the median - as you would expect it to, given that people weren't commuting and there were far fewer road accidents. The figures also disprove the usual talking point that other deaths had increased dramatically because hospital care and chronic medical attention were hard to access. There were certainly some extra deaths, but not on the scale of COVID itself. Unless you're going to claim that some other lethal illness was stalking the land and no one had noticed, COVID is the only remotely plausible explanation for those excess deaths.
- petertodd 6y ago> COVID is the only remotely plausible explanation for those excess deaths. I personally know someone whose father likely died due to being unable to access health care in a timely fashion, as well as someone else who died of cancer after their chemotherapy was postponed. And I also know of two suicides in my extended social group in the past few months. It's tough to pin specific blame on lockdown for things like that. But it's certainly plausible that deaths like that would lead to excess deaths. In the UK specifically the health authorities were estimating in late July that around 21,000 people had died due to lack of access to health care during lockdown: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/29/lockdown-has-killed-21000-people-say-experts/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/29/lockdown-has-kil... In the US there are a lot of concerns that dementia patients in particular are dying due to the isolation caused by lockdown measures: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/09/16/coronavirus-dementia-alzheimers-deaths/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/09/16/coronavirus...
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoI believe what you're talking about ("...likely died due to being unable to access health care in a timely fashion" etc). is is exactly what contributes to an excess death. That's why excess deaths are important, they take into account exactly those deaths caused indirectly. (a bit unclear, but you get me I hope).