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Re:Comparing Covid-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is Like Comparing... by zenpaul on Friday May 01, 2020 @10:19AM (#23042203)
Two important takeaways here.

"In fact, in the fine print, the CDC’s flu numbers also include pneumonia deaths."

"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."

For the average person, COVID-19 is better described as "highly contagious and extra deadly pneumonia".

Re:Comparing Covid-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is Like Comparing... by makomk on Friday May 01, 2020 @11:05AM (#23042664)
Pneumonia is a common fatal complication of influenza, and I think there's reasonably good statistical evidence that the cases counted towards flu deaths are mostly caused by the flu especially in the bad flu epidemic years which are most comparable to Covid-19. That sentence is a bit like claiming that people don't die from falling out of airplanes because the actual cause of death was hitting the ground.
Re:Comparing Covid-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is Like Comparing... by pacala on Friday May 01, 2020 @11:39AM (#23043144)
I think you meant 'flu deaths are mostly caused by [bacterial] pneumonia'. One thought along those lines is that the spike in deaths we see is due to covid19 killing directly, death coming like clockwork X weeks after infection. Compared to the flu, which due to the requirement for a secondary bacterial pneumonia, has a higher variability in the timing of the death: at what time bacterial infection develops, which strain of bacteria, antibiotic interference, etc. Thus, we're going to see higher spikes for covid, and hopefully narrower.
Re:Comparing Covid-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is Like Comparing... by makomk on Saturday May 02, 2020 @07:08AM (#23051032)
Yeah, and apparently one of the more interesting consequences of this is that people don't necessarily have detectable flu virus anymore once they're hospitalized with pneumonia because it's the bacteria allowed in by the now-gone flu infection that's killing them.