incorrect: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7015a7.htm

Those sort of arguments are always made in bad faith. Is it surprising that <arbitrary infectious disease> was lower during the pandemic, in the midst of unprecedented lockdowns and mask mandates? Absolutely not.

The same goes for any argument that claims that COVID deaths were simply mis-classified to take advantage of special hospital reimbursements, and that people were really just dying of the standard flu. It takes almost no effort to show that the ALL-CAUSE risk of dying in America was excessively high during the pandemic years, which turns their argument from "they're just reclassifying flu deaths" into "there's a global conspiracy to submit extra death certificates for fictional people." [1][2][3][4]

[1] Age-adjusted mortality up to 2018 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends...)

[2] Age-adjusted mortality for 2019 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-08-508.pdf)

[3] Age-adjusted mortality for 2020-2021 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db456.pdf)

[4] Provisional age-adjusted mortality for 2022 (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7218a3.htm)

And for easy consumption of that data: https://imgur.com/a/zFYICrt

No. Covid 2020-2022 absolutely blew seasonal influenza out of the water. Flu came back winter of 2022 but was still vastly outnumbered about three to one. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2022-2023/NCHS3...

Shocker: flu cases drop when people wear masks, stop socializing, and obsessively sanitize every surface. What's next? Eating less and exercising causes weight loss?

What’s the point you’re trying to make? We literally know what the COVID virus is. We know its RNA. It is markedly different from the consensus flu viral RNA. Are you trying to imply that COVID is the flu?