Re:Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals
by cycomanic on Thursday March 26, 2020 @04:09PM
(#22697405)
Exactly everyone who is quoting numbers for flu deaths needs to realise these are estimates based on the statistics of how deaths vary year to year, i. e. looking at how many more people died in a flu year compared to other years (simplified). Most people actually don't die of the flu itself but secondary infections (the number of deaths linked directlybto the flu are orders of magnitude lower). Corona directly kills people.
The other thing to remember is the lag in the calculations, the people dying now are the ones who were admitted to hospital a week ago.
Re:Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals
by jfnixon on Friday March 27, 2020 @02:05AM
(#22700723)
"Corona directly kills people"
I'm not so sure about that. Covid may grease the skids, but the vast majority of people dying have health complications already. Kids aren't dying. Teens aren't dying. 20s and 30s aren't dying in numbers. If Covid were directly killing, we'd see kids dying.
Re:Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals
by cycomanic on Friday March 27, 2020 @03:59AM
(#22701094)
That does not follow. Yes the majority of people have preexisting health conditions, but they die directly of the pneumonia that is a result of COVID-19. For the flu, people typically die of secondary infections, e.g. bacterial pneumonia. Someone younger without pre-existing conditions is just much stronger to fight off the infection.
Regarding children, this is actually one of the many questions that is not fully understood, why do children not get so severe symptoms (initial thoughts were they might not even get infected, but this has been disproven by recent studies).
Let's keep it real, the flu infection rate given by the CDC is hindsight knowledge. The real time "global statistics" for COVID19 are with vastly restricted testing. There's not really a valid comparison to be made at this point.