8 ms·

Just look at the death counts, COVID-19 is killing 10x more people than the flu per year. You realize over a million Americans are dead in two years from COVID

Just look at the death counts, COVID-19 is killing 10x more people than the flu per year. You realize over a million Americans are dead in two years from COVID-19, right? The flu in a similar timespan kills ~100k. Right now COVID-19 is the #3 killer of Americans, period. Right behind heart disease and cancer. Doesn't seem comparable to the flu _at all_.

RalfWausE 4y ago
- deepdriver 4y ago
  - RalfWausE 4y ago
    Ok, let me rephrase it: "It is very comparable to the flu if you look at the time when Columbus introduced illnesses in the americas that would later benefit eurpean settlers - and so unknowingly introduced biological warfare to the americas".
    - deepdriver 4y ago
      Unwittingly spreading disease is simply not biological warfare. There is no such thing as “unknowingly” waging it. That is just a pandemic.
    - bigDinosaur 4y ago
      Unknowing introduction of a virus being 'biological warfare' would imply that people flying out of Wuhan in late 2019 were actually engaging in biological warfare. That's a stretch. There's no world, no matter how well intentioned Columbus may have been in an alternate universe, where disease doesn't devastate immunologically naive populations.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > Interestingly, there’s also strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that Columbus was Jewish, born in Italy to descendants of Jewish refugees fleeing the Spanish Inquisition (sorry Italian-Americans!). This line of inquiry seems to have gone quiet around when the “slaver, murder, and rapist” version of Columbus came to dominate public perception I don't see what's the link between his origins and his sins in life. Both can be studied independently regardless of the other. (As long as someone doesn't try to link the fact that he was a "slaver, murder, rapist" alongside being bad in math with the potential fact that he's of jewish origin, that'd be unfortunate).
    - deepdriver 4y ago
      > I don't see what's the link between his origins and his sins in life. Both can be studied independently regardless of the other. I agree! Historians who went quiet on this when “evil Columbus” became the dominant interpretation don’t seem to share that same view. Nor do those who downvoted and flagged my post, apparently.
jcoq 4y ago
I don't think the mortality rate needs to correspond to the incidence of long term effects.
- acchow 4y ago
  I could imagine a world where there's even an inverse correlation (survivorship bias?), tho unlikely.
richdaystrom 4y ago
ekianjo 4y ago
> You realize over a million Americans are dead in two years from COVID-19, right? That number is probably not accurate since there were numerous cases reported of people dying "with COVID" and not "from COVID". Also these numbers were heavily used by the media and authorities to push for widespread vaccination so expect bias.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  No you can look at CDC excess death counts if you're so concerned about the with vs. of COVID minimization. According to excess deaths we're over 1.2 million dead vs. pre-pandemic. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm But to humor you, OK what exactly has caused over a million people to mysteriously die in the last couple years if it wasn't COVID?
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    CDC is not a reliable source. They are completely partisan and sold to Pfizer and Co. Look for other health authorities around the world for a better picture.
  - Proven 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - OrvalWintermute 4y ago
    You're making a cause and effect mistake. We know there is excess mortality. We know there are deaths from covid. We know there are deaths with Covid from events, gunshots and car accidents. We know from actuarial tables there are 3 sigma increases in deaths among some working age populations. We know here in the US, for the majority of the epidemic, the treatment for COVID only started if you were bad off enough to be in the hospital; unofficial off-label treatments have been widely demonized. We know there are alleged weird adverse events from both Covid, and the vaccines. We know some medical treatments for COVID early in the epidemic are now considered contrary to Standard of Care for COVID. We know many people are claiming new disabilities from Covid, and also, the vaccines. We know many people have lost their jobs for refusing vaccination, particularly in healthcare. We know drinking and substance abuse have gone up. We know extreme isolation which many people have experienced has gone through the roof. We know that many industries have been devastated by Covid. We know many people are depressed, and suicide rates have gone up. We know supply chains have been damaged, and some essential supplies may be transferring in greatly reduced numbers. We know that many families have had to do virtual schooling, and have much higher stress levels. We know that many businesses in the US are still treading water and having problems making payroll, with 20% of small businesses missing rent payments in the last 3 months. We know many people are becoming homeless, and some people are likewise going hungry, or starving. We know some states, NY & NJ in particular, ordered at-risk populations of eldery to sequester their vulnerable infected, with the vulnerable un-infected, and to continue to accept covid infected referrals from hospitals. We know that hospitals and potentially others, have received renumerations based on covid cases, diagnoses, and cause of death that may disproportionately effected ICD coding used by hospital administrators. Given all of above, it is dangerously cavalier to point out one singular cause of deaths only.
zuminator 4y ago
Sigh, this is my fault for not stating in bold print that I wasn't trying to make a backhanded argument that COVID is no worse than the flu. It wasn't that type of comment.* I'm really only wondering about whether or not other infectious diseases cause also cause long term issues but it just hasn't been detected before at the level of Covid. To put it more simply I'm wondering if every time we get sick, it decreases our overall vitality just a little bit. Maybe even catching the common cold is chopping a month or two off our lifespan and we never noticed before. * Having said that, of course covid is comparable to the flu. You just did compare it by stating one is 10x the other. Things don't have to be equivalent or even the same order of magnitude to be comparable. I know we're getting into the weeds of what people typically mean when they say "comparable," so again, 100% my fault for not being more clear.
- NoPicklez 4y ago
  Just because I feel the need to say it, I didn't get that vibe from your comment at all. Some people just want to have an argument. But I do wonder the same thing, COVID has obviously been studied enormously around the world. It also seems to impact relatively healthy people in vastly different ways unlike a cold. However, I do wonder if you took a group of people who have been hit with the flu, if you would observe similar long term impacts, albeit perhaps not to the same degree.
  - nradov 4y ago
    The clinical symptoms of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) appear to be very similar to HCoV-OC43. That is another betacoronavirus which is classified as one of the hundreds of endemic "common cold" viruses. It is now suspected to have caused a worldwide pandemic which killed many people starting in 1889. https://doi.org/10.1111/1751-7915.13889 https://doi.org/10.1111/1751-7915.13889 There hasn't been much research on long-term sequelae from HCoV-OC43. I'll bet that if we studied it as closely as COVID-19 we would find similar effects.
- smallnamespace 4y ago
  X and Y aren’t comparable is a rather common expression meaning X is much greater than Y (or vice versa) along some dimension. I suppose the logic is that you wouldn’t actually weigh them against one another because the result is so obvious - compare here perhaps implicitly meaning to weigh both carefully. One can quibble with the logic of the phrase, but GP used it correctly.
nullc 4y ago
Number of people isn't necessarily the best metric, better to look at expected years of life lost, and by that metric covid looks less significant because it kills the old and infirm at a much higher relative rate than e.g. the flu. Then there is the problem of deaths being attributed to covid any time the person who died has a positive covid test in the month prior to their death. It's easy to find numerous examples of people who died in car crashes or from suicide being reported as covid deaths, even still. And interestingly, the mortality rate could even be inversely related to long term effects-- after all, if covid kills you then you don't have any long term effects (except being dead).
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  > Then there is the problem of deaths being attributed to covid any time the person who died has a positive covid test in the month prior to their death. It's easy to find numerous examples of people who died in car crashes or from suicide being reported as covid deaths, even still. I never understood the reasoning behind this. I understand that pinpointing the cause of death is hard, especially with overcrowded hospitals, but I'm guessing that any doctor could circle the "high or low probability of covid causing the death" on the forms after the death of the patient. Covid+pneumonia, intubation, heart failure... sure, it's 99% it really was covid and not an unrelated undiscovered heart issue. Car crash... pretty sure it wasnt directly covids fault. The suicides would be a bit more touchy though.
  - christkv 4y ago
    I think the us numbers are suspect due to the money incentive system set up where hospitalized patients with Covid got a bigger payment that ones without. So if someone came in with a gun shot we wound and was positive he would be marked as died with Covid thus releasing the extra payment and ending up in the statistics.
timr 4y ago
> Just look at the death counts, COVID-19 is killing 10x more people than the flu per year. You realize over a million Americans are dead in two years from COVID-19, right? The flu in a similar timespan kills ~100k. That's fallacious reasoning. Even assuming that every one of those deaths is from Covid, comparing a disease that has been circulating for 3 years with one that has been circulating for many hundreds of years is misleading. Of course the virus with little population immunity is going to have more of an immediate effect. That does not imply that the virus has greater long-term impact, greater overall severity, or anything else. It says that nobody had this virus before, and everyone got it, quickly. On top of all of that, the ~100k people that flu kills, in an average year, is biased toward the young. Covid mortality, on the other hand, is almost exclusively amongst the elderly and infirm.
- robbiep 4y ago
  You have that final stat around the wrong way. The average flu is very heavily weighted towards deaths in the elderly and infirm. We even have a name for a bad flu year - it ‘clears the dead wood’. Covid has been much more significantly impacting younger age groups - those in their 40-60s - compared to the elderly and infirm (comparing the flu death curves).
  - timr 4y ago
    No, I don't. I'm talking about mortality of the young, not middle-aged people (40-60). The flu kills a lot of elderly people, but it also kills a lot of kids. Covid doesn't do that. It's absolutely unquestionable that children are at higher risk from influenza than Covid, but it's also probably an exaggeration to say that Covid kills more middle-aged adults; there's a lot of debate on the issue, and papers like this one suggest significantly lower odds from Covid until age 65: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8375609/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8375609/ Only when you restrict your view to the period of 2020-present do you start to see discussions of Covid leading to higher deaths relative to flu during the pandemic. Here's the UK ONS, doing exactly this: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/howcoronaviruscovid19compareswithfluasacauseofdeath/2022-05-23 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... But you can't go from this to claims about Covid mortality, in general. The flu largely disappeared during the last couple of years, so it's not terribly surprising that it killed fewer people during that same time period. (To be fair to the UK ONS, they aren't making that claim here, but people regularly misinterpret the data.)

RalfWausE 4y ago

deepdriver 4y ago
- RalfWausE 4y ago
  Ok, let me rephrase it: "It is very comparable to the flu if you look at the time when Columbus introduced illnesses in the americas that would later benefit eurpean settlers - and so unknowingly introduced biological warfare to the americas".
  - deepdriver 4y ago
    Unwittingly spreading disease is simply not biological warfare. There is no such thing as “unknowingly” waging it. That is just a pandemic.
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    Unknowing introduction of a virus being 'biological warfare' would imply that people flying out of Wuhan in late 2019 were actually engaging in biological warfare. That's a stretch. There's no world, no matter how well intentioned Columbus may have been in an alternate universe, where disease doesn't devastate immunologically naive populations.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > Interestingly, there’s also strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that Columbus was Jewish, born in Italy to descendants of Jewish refugees fleeing the Spanish Inquisition (sorry Italian-Americans!). This line of inquiry seems to have gone quiet around when the “slaver, murder, and rapist” version of Columbus came to dominate public perception I don't see what's the link between his origins and his sins in life. Both can be studied independently regardless of the other. (As long as someone doesn't try to link the fact that he was a "slaver, murder, rapist" alongside being bad in math with the potential fact that he's of jewish origin, that'd be unfortunate).
  - deepdriver 4y ago
    > I don't see what's the link between his origins and his sins in life. Both can be studied independently regardless of the other. I agree! Historians who went quiet on this when “evil Columbus” became the dominant interpretation don’t seem to share that same view. Nor do those who downvoted and flagged my post, apparently.

jcoq 4y ago

I don't think the mortality rate needs to correspond to the incidence of long term effects.

acchow 4y ago
I could imagine a world where there's even an inverse correlation (survivorship bias?), tho unlikely.

richdaystrom 4y ago

ekianjo 4y ago

> You realize over a million Americans are dead in two years from COVID-19, right? That number is probably not accurate since there were numerous cases reported of people dying "with COVID" and not "from COVID". Also these numbers were heavily used by the media and authorities to push for widespread vaccination so expect bias.

qbasic_forever 4y ago
No you can look at CDC excess death counts if you're so concerned about the with vs. of COVID minimization. According to excess deaths we're over 1.2 million dead vs. pre-pandemic. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm But to humor you, OK what exactly has caused over a million people to mysteriously die in the last couple years if it wasn't COVID?
- ekianjo 4y ago
  CDC is not a reliable source. They are completely partisan and sold to Pfizer and Co. Look for other health authorities around the world for a better picture.
- Proven 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- OrvalWintermute 4y ago
  You're making a cause and effect mistake. We know there is excess mortality. We know there are deaths from covid. We know there are deaths with Covid from events, gunshots and car accidents. We know from actuarial tables there are 3 sigma increases in deaths among some working age populations. We know here in the US, for the majority of the epidemic, the treatment for COVID only started if you were bad off enough to be in the hospital; unofficial off-label treatments have been widely demonized. We know there are alleged weird adverse events from both Covid, and the vaccines. We know some medical treatments for COVID early in the epidemic are now considered contrary to Standard of Care for COVID. We know many people are claiming new disabilities from Covid, and also, the vaccines. We know many people have lost their jobs for refusing vaccination, particularly in healthcare. We know drinking and substance abuse have gone up. We know extreme isolation which many people have experienced has gone through the roof. We know that many industries have been devastated by Covid. We know many people are depressed, and suicide rates have gone up. We know supply chains have been damaged, and some essential supplies may be transferring in greatly reduced numbers. We know that many families have had to do virtual schooling, and have much higher stress levels. We know that many businesses in the US are still treading water and having problems making payroll, with 20% of small businesses missing rent payments in the last 3 months. We know many people are becoming homeless, and some people are likewise going hungry, or starving. We know some states, NY & NJ in particular, ordered at-risk populations of eldery to sequester their vulnerable infected, with the vulnerable un-infected, and to continue to accept covid infected referrals from hospitals. We know that hospitals and potentially others, have received renumerations based on covid cases, diagnoses, and cause of death that may disproportionately effected ICD coding used by hospital administrators. Given all of above, it is dangerously cavalier to point out one singular cause of deaths only.

zuminator 4y ago

Sigh, this is my fault for not stating in bold print that I wasn't trying to make a backhanded argument that COVID is no worse than the flu. It wasn't that type of comment.* I'm really only wondering about whether or not other infectious diseases cause also cause long term issues but it just hasn't been detected before at the level of Covid. To put it more simply I'm wondering if every time we get sick, it decreases our overall vitality just a little bit. Maybe even catching the common cold is chopping a month or two off our lifespan and we never noticed before. * Having said that, of course covid is comparable to the flu. You just did compare it by stating one is 10x the other. Things don't have to be equivalent or even the same order of magnitude to be comparable. I know we're getting into the weeds of what people typically mean when they say "comparable," so again, 100% my fault for not being more clear.

NoPicklez 4y ago
Just because I feel the need to say it, I didn't get that vibe from your comment at all. Some people just want to have an argument. But I do wonder the same thing, COVID has obviously been studied enormously around the world. It also seems to impact relatively healthy people in vastly different ways unlike a cold. However, I do wonder if you took a group of people who have been hit with the flu, if you would observe similar long term impacts, albeit perhaps not to the same degree.
- nradov 4y ago
  The clinical symptoms of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) appear to be very similar to HCoV-OC43. That is another betacoronavirus which is classified as one of the hundreds of endemic "common cold" viruses. It is now suspected to have caused a worldwide pandemic which killed many people starting in 1889. https://doi.org/10.1111/1751-7915.13889 https://doi.org/10.1111/1751-7915.13889 There hasn't been much research on long-term sequelae from HCoV-OC43. I'll bet that if we studied it as closely as COVID-19 we would find similar effects.
smallnamespace 4y ago
X and Y aren’t comparable is a rather common expression meaning X is much greater than Y (or vice versa) along some dimension. I suppose the logic is that you wouldn’t actually weigh them against one another because the result is so obvious - compare here perhaps implicitly meaning to weigh both carefully. One can quibble with the logic of the phrase, but GP used it correctly.

nullc 4y ago

Number of people isn't necessarily the best metric, better to look at expected years of life lost, and by that metric covid looks less significant because it kills the old and infirm at a much higher relative rate than e.g. the flu. Then there is the problem of deaths being attributed to covid any time the person who died has a positive covid test in the month prior to their death. It's easy to find numerous examples of people who died in car crashes or from suicide being reported as covid deaths, even still. And interestingly, the mortality rate could even be inversely related to long term effects-- after all, if covid kills you then you don't have any long term effects (except being dead).

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
> Then there is the problem of deaths being attributed to covid any time the person who died has a positive covid test in the month prior to their death. It's easy to find numerous examples of people who died in car crashes or from suicide being reported as covid deaths, even still. I never understood the reasoning behind this. I understand that pinpointing the cause of death is hard, especially with overcrowded hospitals, but I'm guessing that any doctor could circle the "high or low probability of covid causing the death" on the forms after the death of the patient. Covid+pneumonia, intubation, heart failure... sure, it's 99% it really was covid and not an unrelated undiscovered heart issue. Car crash... pretty sure it wasnt directly covids fault. The suicides would be a bit more touchy though.
- christkv 4y ago
  I think the us numbers are suspect due to the money incentive system set up where hospitalized patients with Covid got a bigger payment that ones without. So if someone came in with a gun shot we wound and was positive he would be marked as died with Covid thus releasing the extra payment and ending up in the statistics.

timr 4y ago

> Just look at the death counts, COVID-19 is killing 10x more people than the flu per year. You realize over a million Americans are dead in two years from COVID-19, right? The flu in a similar timespan kills ~100k. That's fallacious reasoning. Even assuming that every one of those deaths is from Covid, comparing a disease that has been circulating for 3 years with one that has been circulating for many hundreds of years is misleading. Of course the virus with little population immunity is going to have more of an immediate effect. That does not imply that the virus has greater long-term impact, greater overall severity, or anything else. It says that nobody had this virus before, and everyone got it, quickly. On top of all of that, the ~100k people that flu kills, in an average year, is biased toward the young. Covid mortality, on the other hand, is almost exclusively amongst the elderly and infirm.

robbiep 4y ago
You have that final stat around the wrong way. The average flu is very heavily weighted towards deaths in the elderly and infirm. We even have a name for a bad flu year - it ‘clears the dead wood’. Covid has been much more significantly impacting younger age groups - those in their 40-60s - compared to the elderly and infirm (comparing the flu death curves).
- timr 4y ago
  No, I don't. I'm talking about mortality of the young, not middle-aged people (40-60). The flu kills a lot of elderly people, but it also kills a lot of kids. Covid doesn't do that. It's absolutely unquestionable that children are at higher risk from influenza than Covid, but it's also probably an exaggeration to say that Covid kills more middle-aged adults; there's a lot of debate on the issue, and papers like this one suggest significantly lower odds from Covid until age 65: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8375609/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8375609/ Only when you restrict your view to the period of 2020-present do you start to see discussions of Covid leading to higher deaths relative to flu during the pandemic. Here's the UK ONS, doing exactly this: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/howcoronaviruscovid19compareswithfluasacauseofdeath/2022-05-23 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... But you can't go from this to claims about Covid mortality, in general. The flu largely disappeared during the last couple of years, so it's not terribly surprising that it killed fewer people during that same time period. (To be fair to the UK ONS, they aren't making that claim here, but people regularly misinterpret the data.)