Ronan explains in his first post regarding his comparison:
“For the past several years, I have been plotting and comparing week to week influenza mortality data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) mortality surveillance system. The number of coded flu deaths is only a part of the estimated flu deaths each week. I added US coronavirus deaths by week to the plot and got this:
(Image)
I know it’s not apples to apples, the estimated number of flu deaths is about 6 times higher than the numbers recorded by the NCHS, but there is every reason to believe that the actual number of coronavirus fatalities is also larger than the subset that gets confirmed. There has only been 4 weeks of data. Where is this going to end up?”
No way the number of COVID-19 deaths is off by a factor of 6, or even two. And the ONLY valid comparison would be to use estimated flu deaths that add up to around 61k for 2017-2018 (for example), and use the same y-axis for both diseases — the COVID-19 cases “fit”, and the flu mortalities should be scaled properly too. It is freshman high school math at most.
COVID-19 is bad enough - no need to make flim flam comparisons to justify the flu bros.