3 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 COVI

by 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.)

by timr 4y ago

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.)