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Influenza typically has a mortality of around 0.8%¹. There usually is a vaccine against the current strain of influenza, which usually hovers around 45%² effica

Influenza typically has a mortality of around 0.8%¹. There usually is a vaccine against the current strain of influenza, which usually hovers around 45%² efficacy (tops out at ~60%). With covid, we have a mortality rate of something between 0.3% and 3%³. The CFR of influenza includes - to the best of my knowledge, since i can't find any sources - vaccinated people. So without vaccination, influenza would have a CFR around 0.8% * (100% / 45%) ~= 1.78%. This is within the error bars of covid19 CFR, since there was no vaccine until now. I don't want to downplay covid19. I do want to question the effect on the society, and the personal responsibility of everyone involved. @Downvoters: just state why please. If you disagree, please be so kind and educate me why. ¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza ²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine ³https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

DeRock 6y ago
> Influenza typically has a mortality of around 0.8% The Wikipedia article has a graph, which I assume you're referring to with this figure, which shows the mortality rate of 0.8% only applies to those ages 65+. The blended rate for a typical flu season, given in a table below, is <0.1%.
- firebaze 6y ago
  This is the (approximately) same graph for covid19 patients. If influenza was a "new" disease to the immune system of western people, it quite probably would be way more deadly. Original american natives would probably agree.
EthanBar 6y ago
Do you mean influenza typically has a mortality of around 0.8% for those 65 and older? It has a mortality of < 0.1% for everyone from the same Wikipedia article. And CFR, case fatality rate, won't include vaccinated people who didn't get sick so your final calculation doesn't make sense.
agd 6y ago
> I do want to question the effect on the society, and the personal responsibility of everyone involved. What does this mean? There are many factors at play here. Aside from mortality, you also have to look at the R0. Covid 19 has a significantly higher R0 than seasonal flu (estimated 1.5 vs 2.5+). In addition, many people have some immune resistance to seasonal flu, but there was no existing resistance to Covid 19. You only have to look at the health situation in Italy, Portugal, UK and elsewhere to see the difference between the two. Or look at the excess death graphs.
- firebaze 6y ago
  Covid19 is a new disease, noone is primed (by natural immunity) against it. It will be more deadly by nature since this is what nature is. I doubt our response is good. We must protect vulnerable people, and we have the means to. But this is what we are neglecting, and this is what causes deaths. And while we're not protecting vulnerable people, we're also harming (to a not yet known degree) people who are not vulnerable at all: the young. The're being deprived of their education (at least in europe), of their young years, of living their young life. Even my parents in their 60s say they'd rather protect themselves or die instead of causing depression among the young. But who cares.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
Robin_Message 6y ago
The wikipedia page you reference gives all-age mortality of 0.096% for the US 18-19 flu season. So, with your 0.3%-3% CFR, Covid-19 is three to thirty times as deadly as flu. Call it ten times as deadly; it is also more virulent (R0 of 1.4 vs 3-5 for Covid-19). That's why it is being treated more seriously than flu.
sfteus 6y ago
This is like using only GDP to compare economies; it's a useful data point, but it doesn't tell the whole story. From what we've seen, yes, the mortality rate of COVID19 is similar to the flu. However, the mortality rate of the flu is without other interventions aside from the flu vaccine. In a regular flu season the public doesn't social distance; they tend to group even closer indoors because of the cold weather. The US has never normalized mask wearing; people in the beginning stages of the flu will go about their lives, and work places actively encourage people to continue to work in-person unless they are too unwell to do so. I would wager most people in the US don't improve their hygiene during a regular flu season either. We've done all that (to an extent) with COVID19 and we've barely managed to make an impact. Look at some other important data points. Average US flu deaths / year: 36k [1]. COVID19 deaths in the US in only 11 months: 445k. [2] If we assume the first COVID19 death in the US was in early February as some report, that's over 12x the deaths/year than the flu. If current trends hold (~3k deaths/day for the next 27 days) until March 2 (the first officially confirmed COVID19 death in the US), we'd be at 526k deaths, or more than 14x as many deaths/year as the flu. If this ran at this rate for the entirety of the next 365 days, we'd hit nearly 1.1 million deaths, or over 30x as many deaths/year as the flu. That's assuming we don't have any massive improvements with vaccine rollout. The contagiousness of the two is also orders of magnitude different. Flu is estimated to have an R0 value of ~1.5 [3]. Some estimates put COVID19 at an R0 value of 5.7 [4]. (Remember, R0 is without interventions). The way to estimate "herd immunity" rates is the Critical Vaccination Threshold formula: (1 - (1/R0)) / E, where E is the effectiveness of a vaccine. With an R0 of 1.5 and an efficacy of 67% (from your second link. Remember, this is the effectiveness of the vaccine, not the effectiveness in a real-world population, which factors in vaccine rates), we would need roughly 50% of the population to vaccinated to start preventing illnesses in those that are unvaccinated. With an R0 of 5.7 and an efficacy of 94% (Pfizer vaccine), COVID 19 would require nearly 88% of the population vaccinated to achieve the same rate. Even using the lower-quoted R0 value of 2.5 (R-value _with_ other interventions, such as social distancing, mask wearing, improved hygiene), we'd need nearly 64% of the population vaccinated. You're also ignoring the fact that, despite our interventions, there are currently 3 other strains of COVID19 spreading, all of which are speculated to be both more contagious _and_ more deadly. [5] While the current vaccines are _effective enough_ against the strains, there's nothing saying a new variant couldn't emerge that is resistant to the current vaccines, starting a new pandemic. And you're also ignoring the long-term cases of COVID19 [6] as well as the long term effects post-infection outside of death [7], including chronic cardiovascular damage, kidney damage, neurological effects, among many others. So yes, the mortality rates are similar, but literally nothing else is. We don't know enough about this virus to let it run rampant, and the world should have done more from the get-go to keep it contained. [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html [2]: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home [3]: https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/2020/12/07/covid-19-and-influenza-surveillance/ https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/2020/12/07/covid-19... [4]: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2 [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Longer-term_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Longe...
inglor_cz 6y ago
CFR isn't the main problem about Covid, the 5 per cent of cases that end up in hospital is - and for how long they stay there. People with bad cases of Covid routinely spend weeks in ICU before they either get better or die. This is an enormous workload for doctors and nurses. Also, we do not know for sure how long haulers will fare. I myself had heart arrythmia after an otherwise very mild case of Covid. Fortunately, a simple beta blocker helped me and there are no traces of anything worse on my heart, but the doctors that took care of me told me that they have a surge of youngish patients with myocarditis and similar problems. Some of those are actually sportsmen.
- worker767424 6y ago
  > we do not know for sure how long haulers will fare. Annoyingly, most of what we know about long haulers is anecdotal, and long-term effects of covid are in many ways more significant than deaths.
mcguire 6y ago
"The CFR of influenza..." Case Fatality Rate, in case anyone else lost their acronyms. According to worldometers.info, the US has reported 27,101,847 cases of COVID19 and 460,398 deaths, giving a CFR of about 1.70%, so that's about right. I have reservations about your influenza mortality number of 0.8%. Most of the numbers I've seen have been significantly lower. If you look at [1], there were an estimated 29,000,000 symptomatic cases of influenza in the US in 2016 and an estimated 38,000 deaths, giving an estimated CFR of 0.1%, including any effects of vaccination. Correcting for vaccination and making the assumption that everyone were vaccinated, that would result in a unvaccinated CFR of around 0.2-0.3, right? "If you disagree, please be so kind and educate me why." We've been dealing with COVID19 for about a year, no? We've had 27,000,000 cases and 460,000 deaths, right? That's about the same number of cases and 10x the number of deaths. You may not be trying to downplay COVID19, but I suspect you are doing it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statistics_by_flu_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statis...
- worker767424 6y ago
  > the US has reported 27,101,847 cases of COVID19 and 460,398 deaths, giving a CFR of about 1.70%, so that's about right. That's if we catch every case with testing. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but I've heard estimates of 25%-50%. The death toll also lags total cases 2-4 weeks.
worker767424 6y ago
> @Downvoters: just state why please. This doesn't really relate to myths of vaccine manufacturing.

DeRock 6y ago

> Influenza typically has a mortality of around 0.8% The Wikipedia article has a graph, which I assume you're referring to with this figure, which shows the mortality rate of 0.8% only applies to those ages 65+. The blended rate for a typical flu season, given in a table below, is <0.1%.

firebaze 6y ago
This is the (approximately) same graph for covid19 patients. If influenza was a "new" disease to the immune system of western people, it quite probably would be way more deadly. Original american natives would probably agree.

EthanBar 6y ago

Do you mean influenza typically has a mortality of around 0.8% for those 65 and older? It has a mortality of < 0.1% for everyone from the same Wikipedia article. And CFR, case fatality rate, won't include vaccinated people who didn't get sick so your final calculation doesn't make sense.

agd 6y ago

> I do want to question the effect on the society, and the personal responsibility of everyone involved. What does this mean? There are many factors at play here. Aside from mortality, you also have to look at the R0. Covid 19 has a significantly higher R0 than seasonal flu (estimated 1.5 vs 2.5+). In addition, many people have some immune resistance to seasonal flu, but there was no existing resistance to Covid 19. You only have to look at the health situation in Italy, Portugal, UK and elsewhere to see the difference between the two. Or look at the excess death graphs.

firebaze 6y ago
Covid19 is a new disease, noone is primed (by natural immunity) against it. It will be more deadly by nature since this is what nature is. I doubt our response is good. We must protect vulnerable people, and we have the means to. But this is what we are neglecting, and this is what causes deaths. And while we're not protecting vulnerable people, we're also harming (to a not yet known degree) people who are not vulnerable at all: the young. The're being deprived of their education (at least in europe), of their young years, of living their young life. Even my parents in their 60s say they'd rather protect themselves or die instead of causing depression among the young. But who cares.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

Robin_Message 6y ago

The wikipedia page you reference gives all-age mortality of 0.096% for the US 18-19 flu season. So, with your 0.3%-3% CFR, Covid-19 is three to thirty times as deadly as flu. Call it ten times as deadly; it is also more virulent (R0 of 1.4 vs 3-5 for Covid-19). That's why it is being treated more seriously than flu.

sfteus 6y ago

This is like using only GDP to compare economies; it's a useful data point, but it doesn't tell the whole story. From what we've seen, yes, the mortality rate of COVID19 is similar to the flu. However, the mortality rate of the flu is without other interventions aside from the flu vaccine. In a regular flu season the public doesn't social distance; they tend to group even closer indoors because of the cold weather. The US has never normalized mask wearing; people in the beginning stages of the flu will go about their lives, and work places actively encourage people to continue to work in-person unless they are too unwell to do so. I would wager most people in the US don't improve their hygiene during a regular flu season either. We've done all that (to an extent) with COVID19 and we've barely managed to make an impact. Look at some other important data points. Average US flu deaths / year: 36k [1]. COVID19 deaths in the US in only 11 months: 445k. [2] If we assume the first COVID19 death in the US was in early February as some report, that's over 12x the deaths/year than the flu. If current trends hold (~3k deaths/day for the next 27 days) until March 2 (the first officially confirmed COVID19 death in the US), we'd be at 526k deaths, or more than 14x as many deaths/year as the flu. If this ran at this rate for the entirety of the next 365 days, we'd hit nearly 1.1 million deaths, or over 30x as many deaths/year as the flu. That's assuming we don't have any massive improvements with vaccine rollout. The contagiousness of the two is also orders of magnitude different. Flu is estimated to have an R0 value of ~1.5 [3]. Some estimates put COVID19 at an R0 value of 5.7 [4]. (Remember, R0 is without interventions). The way to estimate "herd immunity" rates is the Critical Vaccination Threshold formula: (1 - (1/R0)) / E, where E is the effectiveness of a vaccine. With an R0 of 1.5 and an efficacy of 67% (from your second link. Remember, this is the effectiveness of the vaccine, not the effectiveness in a real-world population, which factors in vaccine rates), we would need roughly 50% of the population to vaccinated to start preventing illnesses in those that are unvaccinated. With an R0 of 5.7 and an efficacy of 94% (Pfizer vaccine), COVID 19 would require nearly 88% of the population vaccinated to achieve the same rate. Even using the lower-quoted R0 value of 2.5 (R-value _with_ other interventions, such as social distancing, mask wearing, improved hygiene), we'd need nearly 64% of the population vaccinated. You're also ignoring the fact that, despite our interventions, there are currently 3 other strains of COVID19 spreading, all of which are speculated to be both more contagious _and_ more deadly. [5] While the current vaccines are _effective enough_ against the strains, there's nothing saying a new variant couldn't emerge that is resistant to the current vaccines, starting a new pandemic. And you're also ignoring the long-term cases of COVID19 [6] as well as the long term effects post-infection outside of death [7], including chronic cardiovascular damage, kidney damage, neurological effects, among many others. So yes, the mortality rates are similar, but literally nothing else is. We don't know enough about this virus to let it run rampant, and the world should have done more from the get-go to keep it contained. [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html [2]: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home [3]: https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/2020/12/07/covid-19-and-influenza-surveillance/ https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/2020/12/07/covid-19... [4]: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2 [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Longer-term_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Longe...

inglor_cz 6y ago

CFR isn't the main problem about Covid, the 5 per cent of cases that end up in hospital is - and for how long they stay there. People with bad cases of Covid routinely spend weeks in ICU before they either get better or die. This is an enormous workload for doctors and nurses. Also, we do not know for sure how long haulers will fare. I myself had heart arrythmia after an otherwise very mild case of Covid. Fortunately, a simple beta blocker helped me and there are no traces of anything worse on my heart, but the doctors that took care of me told me that they have a surge of youngish patients with myocarditis and similar problems. Some of those are actually sportsmen.

worker767424 6y ago
> we do not know for sure how long haulers will fare. Annoyingly, most of what we know about long haulers is anecdotal, and long-term effects of covid are in many ways more significant than deaths.

mcguire 6y ago

"The CFR of influenza..." Case Fatality Rate, in case anyone else lost their acronyms. According to worldometers.info, the US has reported 27,101,847 cases of COVID19 and 460,398 deaths, giving a CFR of about 1.70%, so that's about right. I have reservations about your influenza mortality number of 0.8%. Most of the numbers I've seen have been significantly lower. If you look at [1], there were an estimated 29,000,000 symptomatic cases of influenza in the US in 2016 and an estimated 38,000 deaths, giving an estimated CFR of 0.1%, including any effects of vaccination. Correcting for vaccination and making the assumption that everyone were vaccinated, that would result in a unvaccinated CFR of around 0.2-0.3, right? "If you disagree, please be so kind and educate me why." We've been dealing with COVID19 for about a year, no? We've had 27,000,000 cases and 460,000 deaths, right? That's about the same number of cases and 10x the number of deaths. You may not be trying to downplay COVID19, but I suspect you are doing it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statistics_by_flu_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statis...

worker767424 6y ago
> the US has reported 27,101,847 cases of COVID19 and 460,398 deaths, giving a CFR of about 1.70%, so that's about right. That's if we catch every case with testing. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but I've heard estimates of 25%-50%. The death toll also lags total cases 2-4 weeks.

worker767424 6y ago

> @Downvoters: just state why please. This doesn't really relate to myths of vaccine manufacturing.