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If I caught the flu, how would the government/scientists studying this stuff even know I got it? If you're anything like me you probably just take some time off
by BitwiseFool 5y ago
If I caught the flu, how would the government/scientists studying this stuff even know I got it? If you're anything like me you probably just take some time off and get over the illness without ever seeing a doctor or taking a flu-test. How do they measure such things? I suspect they use some elaborate statistical model to try and generalize the results to the whole population.
- gregmac 5y agoIf you had flu symptoms, are you not going to go get a covid test?
- willcipriano 5y agoI'm not OP but no, I work from home and only see the people I live with since this started. Knowing if its covid vs the flu wouldn't really matter much to me and either way my behavior would be the same. Frankly it would be worse for public health if I left the house while sick to satisfy my curiosity. I can imagine that many others in my situation would come to a similar conclusion.
- qudat 5y agoim in your situation: didnt need to leave my house and minimally interacted with people outside of my bubble. I felt sick recently and got the covid/flu test.
- drcross 5y agoWhy?
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoIf it was me it would be because I wanted to know if I need to be extra isolated from the people I live with.
- johtso 5y agoAlso may impact your future immunity. Good to know what your clinical history is..
- drcross 5y agoExactly. The only result from covid testing it delaying your own civil liberties. The vast vast majority of people wont ever get covid and a tiny remainder will have symptoms, an even smaller number will need to go to bed, a smaller number will need to go to hospital and people who were going to die this year may die from it. Dont take my word for it, this is the opinion of the UKs chief medical officer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzriCFzM5Ys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzriCFzM5Ys
- deadbolt 5y ago> May 2020
- ceejayoz 5y ago(For context: about a week before their first wave of deaths. Oops.) https://imgur.com/a/OZzPVuY https://imgur.com/a/OZzPVuY
- rovr138 5y ago>But that doesn’t mean you can get away from the fact that if we did not do anything, if we let this virus to run, we would be back in a very serious situation that would threaten many lives and threaten the NHS.
- ineedasername 5y agoYou are arguing from an a prior position that "do nothing" would have the same result of "stay home & other precautions". When you start from that position, you are already assuming your point of view is correct, and then using the correctness of that point of view in a circular manner to support your point of view.
- qw3rty01 5y agoDo the people you live with also work from home and never go out?
- rorykoehler 5y agoI had Covid symptoms but didn’t bother getting a test because I thought it’s better to stay at home than go out and spread it around.
- samiru 5y agoI have had a flu the last year twice, both times tested negative.
- ggggtez 5y ago>worldwide Because people outside the US actually see their doctors when they get sick? Or people who are otherwise older/younger/immunocompromised etc. Don't just assume that everyone is a young healthy person like yourself.
- cortesoft 5y agoI don't think not going to the doctor for mild illnesses is a strictly US thing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ggggtez 5y agoThe flu isn't a "mild illness" for everyone. Again, stop assuming that everyone is as healthy as you are. The flu kills many people every year.
- cortesoft 5y agoOf course, but I would say that most people who get the flu don’t experience bad enough symptoms to go to the doctor. I am not sure what your point is with the assuming everyone is healthy. No one is saying that the flu can’t be deadly. The entire thread is about how you calculate how many people got the flu in a year. Some people suffer severe symptoms from the flu, go to the doctor, and are recorded in the statistics as having had the flu. Many people, however, don’t have bad enough symptoms and therefore don’t go to the doctor and are not tracked in the statistics as having had the flu. The question is how do they figure out the actual rates when a large portion of cases are never recorded. What does my own health or the fact that the flu kills many people have to do with that question?
- blueline 5y agohow do you think they measure (roughly) how many people got the flu in previous years?
- pwg 5y agoBy estimation: From the article: "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago." -- emphasis added
- ineedasername 5y agoYes, and that same estimation methodology shows is has decreased significantly. But if you want firm numbers, here's your source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/Week01.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/Week0...
- davidcuddeback 5y agoEstimation usually involves gathering data and applying some statistics to the data. The question was about the details of that process. "They estimated" isn't telling us anything new.
- lreeves 5y agoI don't know where you live but in Canada we have programs like FluWatchers which send sample groups a survey every week asking about flu-like symptoms, flu vaccinations (and COVID now) and such every flu season. They can also request a voluntary sample from you to help track these things. So the data is there :-)
- BitwiseFool 5y agoInteresting, I've never (knowingly) been a part of an epidemiological survey like that.
- monkeybutton 5y agoI was in university when the Ontario Health Study began and they were giving out Amazon gift cards for participating so naturally a ton of students signed up. They send out questionnaires to participants every few months. https://www.ontariohealthstudy.ca/ https://www.ontariohealthstudy.ca/
- lreeves 5y agoYeah it kinda feels cool to be an official FluWatcher, hope I don't lose my status by talking about it ;-)
- thedmstdmstdmst 5y agoIn the province I'm familiar with the Provincial government has canceled all testing for the common Flu unless your in the hospital. This is being misconstrued as the flu disappearing in my province which is obviously true because it's not being test for. It's not being tested for because they are prioritizing COVID-19 testing, unless your hospitalized.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoWhich province was this? Here in Alberta we did twice as many tests as the year before. https://www.660citynews.com/2021/04/13/zero-cases-of-seasonal-influenza-reported-in-alberta-705-new-variant-cases-of-covid-19-identified/ https://www.660citynews.com/2021/04/13/zero-cases-of-seasona...
- rorykoehler 5y agoThey can figure it out by Google search volumes though of course this year would be problematic
- Fomite 5y agoGoogle Flu Trends was remarkably bad at influenza prediction
- DanBC 5y agoThere's intensive community monitoring for flu. Flu's a big deal, which is why there are internationally coordinated programs to monitor which strains are circulating, and then to create and distribute vaccines. See this for an example of the work involved in the UK: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/526405/Flu_Annual_Report_2015_2016.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- 16bytes 5y agohttps://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm > How do they measure such things? By have a sophisticated surveillance network and testing people. To quote from the above page, there have been 931,726 specimens collected since 9/2020, and only 0.2% have been positive. Compare that number to the previous season (13.0%): https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/Week01.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/Week0...
- ineedasername 5y agoThere is literally an entire industrial complex setup to fight the flu on an annual basis, including massive testing & tracking. This is how we have data on annual flu infections. If anything, this year would have been an excellent year to find more flu infections as many people who got sick didn't simply stay home and get over the illness, they went & got tested.
- dnautics 5y agodo people coming in to get tested for corona generally get tested for the flu?
- ectopod 5y agoNot in the UK. My cousin just had a bad dose of something. It's not covid (negative test, he's vaccinated and he had covid a few months ago) and it's not life-threatening so, quite reasonably, nobody cares what it is.
- matwood 5y agoEarly in the pandemic, absolutely. It was easier/quicker to test for the flu and rule out covid, than test for covid to rule out the flu.
- meragrin_ 5y agoHow does testing positive for the flu rule out covid? What is to prevent someone from having both?
- GavinMcG 5y agoNo idea on the technical answer, but the healthcare logistics answer is that because it's not all that likely, a positive flu test was a decent stand-in when COVID tests weren't widely available.
- jtolmar 5y agoSay 1 in 10 people have flu and 1 in 10 have covid. In a population of 100, 9 have just flu, 9 have just covid, and 1 has both. Those 19 people present similar symptoms, and anyone among them has roughly a 53% chance of having each disease. They take a flu test and it comes up positive. Now they're either one of the 9 with just flu, or the one unlucky person with both, so there's only a 10% chance they have covid. The impact of this effect changes if has-flu and has-covid are correlated, but it's still there unless it's a 100% correlation.
- Lendal 5y agoThey probably know how many flu cases end up in the hospital or urgent care, then extrapolate from that number. They have historical data and also geographic, and census data, so they can make pretty good statistical estimates. It's kinda the same math that hardware stores use to figure out how many shovels to stock in a given store each week. Nothing is a mystery if you have data.
- tombert 5y agoGenuinely curious; what kind of math are they using to stock shovels in hardware stores? I've never heard that before but it sounds interesting.
- carlmr 5y agoNot in that business, but normally you expect certain types of shovels to be seasonal. E.g. snow shovels probably sell more in winter, gardening shovels more in summer. Add to that you can usually look at weather data and refine the seasonal estimates, since in a warm winter people buy fewer snow shovels, in a cold spring, people buy fewer gardening shovels. Just put all that into some simple regression models and you probably get a fairly good estimate. The trickiest thing is figuring out how out of stock you are. How many shovels would you have sold if you hadn't run out of stock. So usually you have to be more careful with data points when you might have not registered customers that didn't get what they want in your store.
- greiskul 5y agoHuh, it's funny, I never thought about it, but if you are selling something, the best number of unsold inventory you want to have is 1, not 0. Cause if it's zero, you have no idea how many sales you lost, if it's one, you pretty much stocked perfectly.
- skocznymroczny 5y agoExactly. If you renamed flu to FLU-21, did extensive testing for the flu (doesn't really matter how reliable the tests are), you'd have a pandemic every year.
- greiskul 5y agoWell, the flu only used to kill like 34k people a year in the US. Covid killed over 10 times more, in a population where a significant portion of it was doing social isolation, wearing masks, etc. So yes, maybe you can call flu a pandemic, but don't compare it to Covid after everything the world as seen in the past year.
- Fomite 5y agoThis isn't true. The definition for a flu epidemic is two standard deviations above the expected cases for influenza that year, as estimated by a Serfling-type regression model using a negative binomial distribution. Influenza just doesn't breach that barrier for more than a few weeks most years, and rarely in widespread geographic areas at once. Compare that to SARS-CoV-2, where the expected number of cases is zero. "Epidemic" means something more than "Lots".
- anoncake 5y agoThen that definition is garbage. How bad a disease is does not depend on how bad you expect it to be.
- Fomite 5y ago"Epidemic" isn't "Is a disease bad?". It's "Is this disease occurring at a level above expected?" You can have very serious endemic diseases - malaria is one example. But "Occurring to a level above expected" is an important piece of information all its own - for example, five cases of Smallpox, while only five cases, is something of an emergency, whereas five cases of influenza is not a serious crisis.
- 5y ago
- fma 5y agoWell - I imagine something like the Seattle Flu Study where volunteers answer questions and get samples taken if they are sick. https://seattleflu.org/ https://seattleflu.org/
- Fomite 5y agoWe have extensive sentinel surveillance systems and reporting physicians that, you correctly guess, are used to inform population-level estimates. Flu surveillance is probably the most comprehensive and robust disease reporting system we have in the U.S. outside the things that are mandatory reports (and even likely some of those).
- FearlessNebula 5y agoYou're probably thinking of the common cold. If you actually had the flu there's a decent chance you'd go to the hospital or at least a doctor who would run a test
- mike00632 5y agoMost Covid-19 tests also test for the flu.