[Grampa Dave]

2017 data is irrelevant.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm

CDC’s estimate of deaths from the old flu this year through 15 Feb 2020 to be: 16k - 41k.

Often the higher death rates occur in the latter part of February.

[mewzilla]

And the rates are tricky, because not everyone who gets the flu ends up going to a doc. And not everyone who goes to a doc with suspected flu gets tested and confirmed. Hospital admissions for it are routinely tested. And while dead bodies are easy to count, causation of death is not always clearly, uniformly determined.

[DouglasKC]

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm CDC’s estimate of deaths from the old flu this year through 15 Feb 2020 to be: 16k - 41k. Often the higher death rates occur in the latter part of February.

That sounds like the right neighborhood because added in to pneumonia (which is how they seem to mostly track deaths with flu) that would make it around 80 to 85 thousands combined which is a number that's thrown out.