Posted on 01/29/2020 12:58:13 PM PST by rightwingintelligentsia
While much of the world is focused on the coronavirus outbreak, influenza continues to take its toll in the United States, where an estimated 15 million people have been infected and 8,200 have died from the disease so far this flu season.
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said those numbers aren't unusually high, they're far higher than the 4,583 cases of coronavirus and 106 deaths confirmed worldwide as of Tuesday morning. Five people have been stricken with coronavirus in the U.S. and no deaths have been reported.
Overall, the World Health Organization estimates that the flu kills up to 650,000 people per year worldwide.
"When we think about the relative danger of this new coronavirus and influenza, there’s just no comparison," Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told USA Today. "Coronavirus will be a blip on the horizon in comparison. The risk is trivial."
CDC officials have also said there is currently little risk of catching coronavirus in the U.S.
(Excerpt) Read more at weather.com ...
Can’t really say that until Coronavirus is gone.
The people who are actually DYING from the flu are 85 year olds who had something else going on. You may as well say “pneumonia” is the most deadly. Those folks were gonna die sooner rather than later anyway.
I’m surprised that The Global Warming Channel even took time away from their normal propaganda to comment on Coronavirus.
Most the time they list cause of death as smoking related.
OMG,....it’s a TOOORRRCOOONNN!
I’m sure that explains the Chinese government’s reaction to the whole thing.
Yes. In other news, the war dead in Hawaii was at 0 on 12/6/1941.
I am not advocating panic or drama. But at least in China is continues to be a big deal. I would be cautious about dismissing it out of hand until it stops growing at 30% a day.
Or it runs rampant in the US. Silly to say this at this moment.
Lol - exactly. These dimwits are comparing a long-standing, ongoing infection to one that just hit our shores.
Yeah, they're used to the flu, but this is new and different. /S
The Weather Channel can’t give a simple current weather report or forecast without following a politically correct narrative. They also issue to all their personnel the “Woke manual for all media people and Democratic activists”. Use it or lose your job.
“When we think about the relative danger of this new coronavirus and influenza, there’s just no comparison,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told USA Today. “Coronavirus will be a blip on the horizon in comparison. The risk is trivial.”
He appears to be the only scientist in the world who knows this to be a fact.
I wondered when I saw a news quote of 80,000 Flu related deaths in the U.S. last year.
I was going to say “brilliant” response. Well I guess I just did. This thing is just getting going and people are comparing to something that has been ongoing since prior to Fall of last year.
It’s premature to state this is a nothing burger, which I hope it is. Numbers coming out of Asia are not encouraging and probably aren’t the true numbers.
I think any country that is blocking off roads and quarantining millions of citizens with numbers that are remarkably low for this type of strategy is hiding something.
Not a valid comparison !
Existing entrenched disease versus a brand new disease that is not yet established in the country.
Right. That headline should have been qualified with, “so far as we know.” We simply do not know what the situation is in China. The Party “manages” information flow. We can guess how far it has spread by Chinese government actions but we do not know how many people are sick in the quarantined area nor how many have expired. I have increased my D3 intake. It is proof against the common respiratory viruses. I don’t know whether it has any effect on the corona viruses but it is one thing to do that might be effective. So far, if the reports are accurate (IF) the death toll is not large. Far more are sick than even the Chinese authorities know. Remember SARS. Toward the end of the SARS run a doctor tested an entire Turkish village that had supposedly been “devastated” by the malady and found the death rate was actually about the same as generic flu because he tested the entire population of the village for antibodies and found that the entire village had been infected and only a small proportion of those actually had symptoms bad enough be reported as sick.
I disagree.
The death rate is around 2% for the corona virus.
The death rate for typical influenza viruses in the USA is a small fraction of 1%.
For instance - the 2017-2018 flu season had about 45 million cases in the USA.
Total flu-related deaths in that time period were about 61,000.
That's less than 0.2%.
If the current corona numbers hold up, corona is 10 times more deadly than most influenza.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
They pointed it that it’s not as deadly as SARS. But then someone pointed out that that might actually be worse since the victims live long enough to spread it.
“They pointed it that it’s not as deadly as SARS”
It is easier to contract than SARS.
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