4 ms·

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

• 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.)