“For trolling the flubros… twice as many deaths today from covid as the flu?”
They always pick the high end numbers to support their narrative.
Tomorrow or the next day, barring a miracle, CCP-19 passes the in-season flu daily death toll. :(
Their original arguments were all based on absolute numbers and they never listened to arguments about this spreading like, or worse than, the flu. Now it should be obvious to any but the true Village Idiots. It’s NOT the flu.
This guy uses the highest numbers for flu : 50,000/year
https://twitter.com/keatonc33/status/1243023138465681413
Well, whatever.
As far as deaths, it has always been clear that without massive effort, this virus would be far worse than the flu. We saw that happen in Italy, where they refused to act before their hospitals were overwhelmed, then struggled to implement measures. With 5.5X Italy's population, their death rate would mean over 41,000 Americans dead in a single month. Without action, those numbers would still be rising exponentially instead of tapering off. There is a reason no country was willing to let CV19 burn through their population.
Post 407 is what got me thinking about this:
Somehow this ***** has told all other disease processes to get out of town.
How much of that is COVID-19 interrupting other diseases on a cellular(?) level, and how much are the other diseases being better prevented due to social distancing, increased hand washing, etc.?
My guess is that there will be a period in each area when modest efforts to control COVID-19 result in a drop in positive flu tests even as COVID-19 ramps up. PART of the latter is likely due to tests "catching up" with the backlog of infections.
Deaths from flu vs. deaths from COVID-19, adjusted for duration of each case for likely date of infection, and then observed vs. level of control efforts, might be even more "illuminating", as that would eliminate the distortion of test results catching up with the backlog of tests needed.
I'll further guess that even when testing is fully "caught up", controls sufficient to lower the rate of COVID-19 infections will be shown to suppress flu much more: Another demonstration of the higher infectiousness of COVID-19.
If flu and other contagious diseases potentially resulting in hospitalizations (esp. for vulnerable folks) actually drop in numbers due to controls aimed at COVID-19, that buys a little ICU capacity. My guess is that it will only equate to a day or two in time, but it should still save lives. This much more so if ICU and ventilator capacity is not exceeded by total needs.