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The chance of dying from the seasonal flu or getting permanent health damage is significantly less. Counted like COVID19 there are only about 15 000 who die fr

• makomk 6y ago
  Every single attempt to count flu deaths "like Covid-19" that I've come across compares apples to oranges in a way that downplays the number of flu deaths. There are some really critical gotchas that make apparently like-for-like comparisons misleading. For a start, Covid-19 testing is much more widespread than flu testing. The UK has been testing everyone hospitalized for any reason for Covid, which they don't do for flu, and I think other Western countries are broadly similar. The flu tests are also less sensitive. Not only that, but because flu tends to kill more via secondary bacterial pneumonia, apparently patients don't necessarily have enough influenza virus left to test positive by the time they're hospitalized, whereas Covid causes pneumonia directly. Also, there's strong statistical evidence that flu causes heart attacks which aren't recorded as influenza deaths on things like death certificates. The headline CDC, etc stats take all this into account to estimate the number of people who died as a result of flu, in the sense that they'd have lived if they weren't infected. The "counted like Covid-19" stats generally don't count these as flu deaths, whilst comparing with stats that count almost anyone who died after being infected with Covid-19 as a Covid-19 death regardless of whether it was directly caused by Covid in this sense. They really don't compare like with like.