I read through the CDC's website the other day and they were rather vague as to how many annual flu deaths actually tested positive for the flu... Turns out not very many.
ER Doctor in Boston writes that he started hearing everyone talk about the number of flu deaths every year and he realized that throughout his career he only had one case of flu die and it was a pediatric. Statistically he should have seen many, many, more since the annual flu death totals are supposedly in line or greater than gunshots, opiods, and auto accidents. Which he saw all of the time. So he started digging:
I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.
Turns out the CDC dramatically overestimates confirmed flu deaths an "average six times greater than the number of flu deaths that are actually confirmed." It got me thinking, I have had friends and family members die of everything under the sun.. several from gunshots and auto accidents. Never once from the flu or pneumonia.
The author is biased, who isn't these days... But this little bit explains why healthcare workers were getting overwhelmed...
Can we accurately compare the toll of the flu to the toll of the coronavirus pandemic?
To do this, we have to compare counted deaths to counted deaths, not counted deaths to wildly inflated statistical estimates. If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.
From this perspective, the data on coronavirus and flu actually match—rather than flying in the face of—our lived reality in the coronavirus pandemic: hospitals in hot spots stretched to their limits and, in New York City in particular, so many dead that the bodies are stacked in refrigerator trucks. We have never seen such conditions.
Anyway... I can't remember anyone get the flu and actually dying in my circles.
Interesting read.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/
ER Doctor in Boston writes that he started hearing everyone talk about the number of flu deaths every year and he realized that throughout his career he only had one case of flu die and it was a pediatric. Statistically he should have seen many, many, more since the annual flu death totals are supposedly in line or greater than gunshots, opiods, and auto accidents. Which he saw all of the time. So he started digging:
I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.
Turns out the CDC dramatically overestimates confirmed flu deaths an "average six times greater than the number of flu deaths that are actually confirmed." It got me thinking, I have had friends and family members die of everything under the sun.. several from gunshots and auto accidents. Never once from the flu or pneumonia.
The author is biased, who isn't these days... But this little bit explains why healthcare workers were getting overwhelmed...
Can we accurately compare the toll of the flu to the toll of the coronavirus pandemic?
To do this, we have to compare counted deaths to counted deaths, not counted deaths to wildly inflated statistical estimates. If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.
From this perspective, the data on coronavirus and flu actually match—rather than flying in the face of—our lived reality in the coronavirus pandemic: hospitals in hot spots stretched to their limits and, in New York City in particular, so many dead that the bodies are stacked in refrigerator trucks. We have never seen such conditions.
Anyway... I can't remember anyone get the flu and actually dying in my circles.
Interesting read.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/
