Note also these numbers are for the UK, one of the top worst countries hit in terms of deaths per million in the world.
Also, Covid does not seem to have the same seasonality that the flu has, which peaks in cold winter months. It may therefore not be altogether accurate to merely compare Jan-Aug. We may need the whole year's data to better compare.
I'm looking at this [1] data, Table 4, specifically the row for April.
Deaths in April
Pneumonia+Influenza, 5yr avg: 2,354.8
Pneumonia+Influenza, 2020: 1,933
COVID: 29,128
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=%2fpeoplepopulationandcommun...
April was peak, pre-lockdown, full-blown pandemic conditions. That's a 12x difference. Bad. Shit.
To be clear: the flaw doesn't flip my interpretation of the results or anything, but it's still a glaring flaw that doesn't seem to be addressed in the article.
# of deaths Jan-Aug (due to either flu, pneumonia or Covid)
2000: 40,436 2020: 14,013 + 48,168
Yes, this is significant and certainly Covid seems to be able to spread across a vulnerable population much more quickly than the flu but it doesn't seem to be orders of magnitude deadlier on balance. I get why people thought it was 10-20x in the beginning but it seems as we've learned more it is not the plague we thought it was.
Also note the numbers for August have already flipped so that 4x more people are dying of flu and pneumonia now than of Covid.
> I get why people thought it was 10-20x in the beginning
It was 10x in the beginning. It averaged 12x for an entire month. It was 15x for numerous days in a row, and this is despite it infecting far fewer people than the flu. It was why we had a massive global lockdown, mask mandates, social distancing, the whole shitshow, in case you missed that.
At this point I am inclined to disengage because you, specifically, have been all over every single COVID thread with the same misinformation and distortions. Frankly, it's tiring. It doesn't matter what the numbers are anymore. Never did. "Just a flu". smh.
The virus is getting less deadly. You can have many hypotheses for why that is: better treatments, younger patients, viral mutations, or just better testing which is giving us a clearer picture of the actual threat.
But you can't deny that YTD, the data does not show a disease that is anywhere close to 10-12x the flu. The fact that the flu has already surpassed Covid in monthly deaths (despite being less infectious) by the month of August at a rate of 4x Covid should tell you something, and we're not even in peak flu season yet.
Like others have mentioned, if this disease is capable of spreading much more rapidly than the flu, then it may knock out many of the same people who would have been vulnerable to the flu in a subsequent year. It may be that better treatments cause the death rate to continue to plummet. Is it fair to compare a disease we have been fighting for thousands of years to a novel virus we had no idea about 8 months ago? Probably not. As best practices and treatments get established it may very well turn out that Covid remains less deadly than the flu in perpetuity.
[citation needed]
Considering that covid-19 is a pandemic, and has not yet reached the point where its endemic, we can't actually know that.
> The number of deaths from flu, pneumonia, and Covid are about 50% higher than the year 2000 (Jan-Aug)
Correct, welcome to averages.
In april the total mortality was between 50 and 125% higher than normal (per week, looking at total deaths, not counting where covid was mentioned.) That peak was neatly 3-4 weeks after lockdown was imposed. So to answer your question "justify the draconian measures" do you want to re-run that experiment? because I don't like the look of those odds. Looking at the USA, where they've tried it, it doesn't look too hot either.
see raw data here https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
These are the numbers with "draconian" counter measures. We can only imagine the numbers without them. And that is what should be compared with the numbers from flu and pneumonia. Luckily, we don't have these numbers.
However, we need to compare COVID-19 to Influenza to get some perspective. I would argue that Influenza is worse than COVID, for the simple reason that it kills more young people and children. The average age of a COVID fatality is higher than life expectancy. Influenza destroys more years of life.
We also need to make a distinction between the time frame in which the virus was new and killed a disproportionate amount of susceptible people, versus the time frame we are in now, where the virus is once again kills less people than Influenza - as the data clearly shows, though it isn't highlighted in the publication.
I think that's a very good point. And also one of the reasons the perspectives differ so much.
However we don't know yet about the long-term effect of COVID on younger people. It could still very well lead to a decreased quality of life for young people as we've seen in other posts about scarring of the lungs and permanent fatigue.
Granted influenza can cause similar after effects (like pericarditis and permanent fatigue), but it appears to be less frequent.
Agreed, but we don't destroy economies over it, we just get on with things and accept it for what it is.
If it's similar seasonality to Spanish flu, expect 4 waves. This is start of the second wave, likely biggest.
The rest of your comment is pure speculation. It now seems to be the given narrative that there will be a second wave despite coronaviruses having different characteristics from flu. I would argue that the current second waves in Europe are really the first wave continuing after lockdown restricting were lifted (plus a lot more testing). The number of deaths isn't rising much.
Did it, though? https://web.archive.org/web/20201008174215if_/https://www.ec...
This is an unfalsifiable claim, considering that virtually every country has done something to inhibit spread. It's also meaningless, because nobody is saying that nothing should be done to inhibit spread.
The question is, what should be done? How many people-years can we realistically save, and at what cost? Every year, almost 3 million Americans will die of any cause. If we take a CFR of 0.4%, and a "herd immunity" threshold of 70%, the upper bound of deaths in the US from COVID-19 is under a million. The average age of a COVID-19 fatality is higher than life expectancy, which means that half of these deaths would've occured under any circumstance, in the near future. We can see high excess mortality right now, but we haven't seen how that translates into lowered mortality in the future.
COVID is not to be trifled with.
Comparing places with and without lockdowns there's actually little evidence that lockdowns led to a reduction in mortality: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/social-distancing-more-imp.... What was associated with a reduction in mortality was social distancing.
"The analysis of COVID-19, influenza and pneumonia deaths in this bulletin focuses on deaths where these conditions were the underlying cause of death (deaths “due to”), rather than deaths where the conditions were either the underlying cause or mentioned as a contributing factor (deaths “involving”). Data for deaths where COVID-19, influenza and pneumonia were a contributing factor are available in the accompanying dataset."
They also point to this document for more details: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
There is no way to know if somebody would have died from the flu/pneumonia if they didn't first die from COVID-19. Excess death calculations provide a hint but are confounded by additional variables created by the lockdown (eg people not getting exercise, not getting checkups, not eating as well, depression, etc.)
Furthermore excess death calculations can only take into account < one year of data at present. We don't know if it takes off 0.5, 1, 2, 3 or more years of your life expectancy ie. would you likely have died of a respiratory illness in 2021, 2022, etc. - these are important questions, I've seen estimates saying 8 years - which is a very compelling argument for lockdown - but would 0.5 or 1 year have the same gravity?
> This is pretty damming to anyone who claims "its just
> the flu"
“More than three times as many deaths were recorded between January and August this year where COVID-19 was the underlying cause compared to influenza and pneumonia."
“The mortality rate for COVID-19 is also significantly higher than influenza and pneumonia rates for both 2020 and the five-year average."
“Since 1959, which is when ONS monthly death records began, the number of deaths due to influenza and pneumonia in the first eight months of every year have been lower than the number of COVID-19 deaths seen, so far, in 2020.”