Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is Like Comparing Apples to Oranges
When reports about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 began circulating earlier this year and questions were being raised about how the illness it causes, COVID-19, compared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.
Based on the CDC numbers though, I should have seen many, many more. In 2018, over 46,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. Over 36,500 died in traffic accidents. Nearly 40,000 died from gun violence. I see those deaths all the time. Was I alone in noticing this discrepancy?
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.
Update: A related discussion here. (h/t dizzy)
Dr Tam from 2010 NFB Documentary on Pandemic’s. Bracelets for tracking, can not go anywhere if you refuse vaccination’s. Put you in Detention Camp if you refuse VACCINATION. POS Communist Devil’s. In another story the UN talks about forcefully removing your kids. Never surrender your guns. It is getting close to that time that comes in every tyranny. Be prepared for anything these people are insane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtSgG6-96×0&feature=emb_logo
The government has been tracking us for decades. They know every penny I’ve made since I was 15. There was a time when the government did not track our income. Now…it’s completely normal and accepted. They never used to track where people lived, or where they registered vehicles, or if we were “OK” to buy guns. The next generation will be totally OK with government tracking their every waking moment. (for the greater good of course).
Frogs in the pot.
I remember the day my first SIN card arrived in the mail. My grandfather was visiting and he grabbed the card from hand, cut it up and flushed the pieces. “Government control!” he ranted. My grandfather was as gentle a man as I have ever known. He never raised his voice or his fist. I was gobsmacked then and now we see how right he was.
I believe that it is a practical impossibility to drop out and a live a life free from the tax collector. Perhaps the last person to do that was Ted Kaczynski but he ran afoul of other government agencies.
National Vitals Statistics Report
Deaths: Final Data for 2017
Page 6 Table B, not an estimate.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf
Nice source.
Now … will a very scienci-sounding Scientific American blogging ER Doctor explain to me how many “second hand smoking deaths” he’s treated in the past year? certainly he has treated dozens of second hand smoking deaths … out of the “50,000 second hand smoking deaths per year” … and he must certainly remember the pediatric cases … because “the children”. Ohhh mammma … “the children”.
We need to STOP with all the data manipulation … algorithms… data homogenizing … smoothing … etc. just STOP. Because the purpose of all this data manipulation is political. It has nothing to do with REALITY or actual HEALTH.
8500 died last year in canada from the flu? Apples or oranges that will be double the Chinese flu casualties
Today Canada’s death total from Covid19 is 2,852. We had better get cracking – we have long way to go before we pass deaths from seasonal flu.
Terry, according to stats can an average of 732 Canadians die every day from all causes. give me a call when death is a serious matter.
If we reported the flu daily like they are reporting covid-19.
Data example –
Week – 201701
Total Type A – 4167
Total Type B – 407
Percent Positive A – 11.77
Percent Positive B – 1.14
Number Tested – 35405
Percent Positive – 12.91
I took the total number of all 2017 weeks, you can see them at the links below.
Year 2017
Total Positive results Influenza Type A – 113224
Total Positive results Influenza Type B – 45138
Total number of people tested – 1165923
Percent of positive tests – 13.58%
Total Type A & B – 158362
CDC J09 – J18 Deaths (Influenza and pneumonia) – 55672
Case Fatality Rate – 35.15% (number or deaths / number of positive flu cases)
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2017-2018/data/whoAllregt_cl39.html
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2017-2018/data/whoAllregt_cl39.html
I would add that I have never seen a million dollars, but I am sure it exists.
You nailed it.
There are huge data quality issues. One may have doubts on the flu death count. Seeing the death count on the Wuhan flu … certainly needs “some scrutiny” as well. There are numerous reports from all over the world that Covid19 is added even without test as cause, and that it is indeed not easy to understand the leading cause if there are numerous diseases, and various kinds of virus without an autopsy.
The 2019/2020 flu season (right before the Coronavirus hit) was kind of bad in parts of the USA, like NY State and City. It is at least likely that since mid March the remaining flu deaths there are counted as Covid deaths if there was a presence, or suspected presence of the coronavirus. Doctors were told to certify that way, even without testing.
Data quality is an issue, both on the flu, but certainly on Covid 19 as well.
Higher temperatures will help to fight this terrible wave. This is ending soon, and it need to in order to avoid a much more lethal collapse of social and economic structures.
I am honestly just starting to tune this all out as BS. (not just wuhan stuff…but pretty much anything the government, government scientists, government bureaucrats or government media tell me) Once you dive a little deeper on just about anything they tell you it becomes apparent that there is some underlying nefarious motive. (whether that’s profits, power or corruption or some mixture)
It’s a giant waste of my tax dollars to pay these yahoos to feed me bs so they can try and take more of my earnings when everything they say I have to independently research because every single one of them is either corrupt, incompetent or both. The sooner the majority of people come to the understanding that the government is NOT here to help the better. And yes…I include the bought and paid for media propagandists in with the government.
Those who can do. Those who can’t…govern.
Hopefully, every chinese cafe in North America will go out of business from this .
I haven’t been a doctor for years, but I have been an observer for decades and now that I think about it, I have known more people who died from a brown recluse spider bite (1) than have suffered any sort of lasting harm at all from the flu, never mind death.
Falling, accidental poisoning, murder, drowning, all with annual death numbers a fraction of the flu and I’ve known at least a few people who have died from each.
Maybe I don’t spend enough time in the “last month to live” ward at a nursing home when flu season is ongoing.
How about some of the “50,000 second hand smoking deaths per year” … surely you pronounced many, many, people who never smoked … but died because someone did. Surely. *cough* *cough* uh oh! I coughed … my Doctor needs to code that as “suspected second hand smoking symptoms” … by order of Obamakkare.
Yes … the nonsensical “secondhand smoking” statistics are a fkcuing pet peeve of mine. Because ALL our Doctors and Scientists have blithely accepted this nonsense as “truth” without any complaint. And no, I’ve never smoked in my entire life.
I suspect this rubbish statistic was created from the same algorithm used to “estimate” yearly Flu deaths.
Oh … and BTW … I FEAR a brown recluse spider bite far more than the Kung Flu. Or even common flu … For very good reason. It’s REAL!
At the time the CDC declared second hand smoke to be a carcinogen, I researched with some diligence the underlying statistical justification for it.
It turns out they used a little less than half of the available studies. Curiously, the ensemble of rejected studies revealed a lack of correlation. Of course, the reason they were rejected had nothing to do with that. No, no.
Even the ones they did use, revealed a barely positive correlation, which was so low as to be statistically insignificant.
I personally am convinced there is less reason to suspect second hand smoke than smoggy cities, as the amount of pollutants in the air in the latter are much more than in the homes of smokers. But it is such an emotional issue I have never been able to argue the statistics. How can you smoke in the same house as your children! Even though personally I quit cold turkey on the day of my marriage, but just arguing the point made me a monster.
I suspect the reason for the numbers is somewhat the same as corona virus deaths. Any death of a patient infected with the latter is automatically ascribed to it. Any any lung cancer death is almost automatically ascribed to second hand smoke. There must be a family or friend who have smoked in front of the victim!
From the original article’ “While in the past it was justifiable to err on the side of substantially overestimating flu deaths, in order to encourage vaccination and good hygiene, at this point the CDC’s reporting about flu deaths is dangerously misleading the public and even public officials about the comparison between these two viruses. ” … ah, I see, the ends justify the means, truth is irrelevant; this is real science folks!
“We now know that Trump was disastrously wrong about the threat that the coronavirus posed to the United States.”
What no mention of Pelosi and the Dems, Cuomo all partying on and that Mr Trump was a xenophobe for wanting to limit travel to the USA?
No mention of the WHOs botchups? No mention of wildly wrong projections?
Just Trump is the bad guy.
Ignore all prior CDC data – just use my anecdotal observations. Right.
Covid 19 and seasonal flu may well be apples and oranges. That doesn’t change that fact that the left is leveraging it with whatever means possible to implement their wettest of ruling class dreams – and in the USA remove Trump.
Sure they lie about AGW, Trump Russia and Conservatives in general, and frame their political enemies. But believe what they say on this.
I suspect the same thing could be said of the covid nonsense. Given as any death that is ‘suspicious’ or where it is suspected or where the covid virus was present …… Like many afflictions ascribing sole responsibility for a death is a bit of a mugs game. All of which seems to set aside the fact that it is not the job of the government to tell us how to run our lives. If we wanted to stop AIDS we could do it in very short order by only allowing people with AIDS to have sex with people who also have AIDS. That solution isn’t politically palatable so that method was not tried. Yet somehow or other the government can shut down the entire economy and put everyone’s life at risk with broken supply chains and closed hospitals and delayed ‘elective’ surgeries. Let the people decide if they want to stay home or not. Don’t subsidize to do so but it they are that worried about a cold then stay home. Those who don’t want to stay home keep working and keep the government out of our pockets.
In their zeal to attack Trump they accidentally reveal their bullish!t.
Fire Them All.
It does descend into the Trump derangement area. If there was any good from it, it is lost in the screed. But, I am amazed that the learned doctor does not seem to know that the CDC puts out yearly vital statistics that actually label influenza and pneumonia deaths as derived from death registration.
Don’t worry Dwayne
We have the opposite of Trump Derangement Syndrome. We have Bonnie Henry Infatuation Syndrome BHIS.
I downloaded the presentation that she have on modelling and projections even though she says wont predict deaths like Ontario does, “because it is not useful”. But she will predict “something”, with the end result being future deaths and economic misery due to her WHO-scripted responses. Anyway, her modelling is all based on Imperial College. Neil Ferguson’s work. The same guy who totally botched and destroyed livelihoods in the early 2000’s with the Hoof and Mouth disease outbreak in the UK.
Our problem is that we have a fawning press. Afraid to question “a doctor”. I work with physicians. I help them with their clinical trials and investigator-driven experiments because they generally don’t know statistics and they don’t know how to design a damn experiment. Bonnie Henry and T. Tam are running a damn experiment with our lives and our economy and they don’t know spit from shinola.
The “public health professionals” are having their day. I notice at these gab fests that there seems to be a lack of economic advisors. A good leader knows to utilize all of their subject matter experts before making a decision. If you get input from only one side you miss the big picture. All the politicians have lost the big picture and focused on only one thing, maybe due to media focus, or maybe due to incompetence and fear of making a mistake. At any rate, it is time to get more input, because these “experts” would have us hide under our beds until a vaccine is available, and that is not a realistic solution at all.
Dwayne, many good points.
We need a way out of this lockdown.
Personal view, we are ignoring Taiwan & any country that is acting similarly. Why?
Scientific American went over to the dark side a long time ago.
Yes. They believe in Gerbil worming, too. And notice how this oh-so-scientific Doctor is basing his screed entirely on anecdotal data? He called colleagues and asked “do you remember?” And who is to say he didn’t cherry-pick the answers?
I see I am not the only one to spot that little brain fart.
The author tells us Flu death numbers are flawed,then cites the Wuh Hoo numbers as gospel.
However the point is noted,you have lies damned lies and then statistics..
Bureaucrats are very skilled in the last,statistics are wonderful for manufacturing whatever evidence you need.
Until the Died Of and Died With can be reliably separately counted,the numbers being preached are just noise.
In the end uncommonsense will have to be heard.
The hour and means of your death are about the only uncertainty in your life cycle.
That you will die is certain,because you now live.
And the supposed “value of a life” is a mighty flexible unit.
Knowing we shall die,is one of those freedoms self knowledge brings,self awareness is truly a blessing.
Having “authority” chose for me is unacceptable.
No bureaucrat,no government expert has any right to know better than I how I shall live or die..especially if their paycheck depends on it.
The entire false premise of the pandemic shutdown,is that they know better than you..
This is for your own good.
Do as we say,because we know better…
But now every indication is ..NO,they are even dumber than we imagined.
Computer modelling caused epic bedwetting..But the most basic safety supplies for pandemic were not ready,not in storage.
Hospitals were cleared,normal medical procedures postphoned and cancelled, for an event,saturation of medical facilities, that did not happen.
Look back on what we did in previous pandemics.
Why was panic our first choice, this time?
Why are we content to starve in place,for fear of a nasty flu?
Why do we not understand,life is gonn’a get us, no matter what we do?
Life;Defined as a sexually transmitted terminal dis-ease.
We have now demonstrated how afraid we are of living.
So enjoy the deathcult.
For those who fear death obsessively soon come to worship it.
Well said sir.
PS … to all those who are comparing the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic to this KungFlu epidemic need an immediate HISTORY lesson. As in REAL history … not the “History” they learned in middle school. And then they can compare and contrast all the differences in our sanitation, and medical care sophistication today … vs the early 1900’s.
I have a hand written diary of my grandmother’s … describing the 2 mo.+ journey across America from Erie PA, to San Diego CA in 1918, when she was a high schooler. If you read her account … you might learn how starkly different 2020 is from 1918. And they took the trip in a black Model T. Yep. Black. Hint: there was NO interstate freeway system. Let alone intrastate highway system
Even as late as the early sixties they were only starting to build the interstate freeway system. I drove cross country at that time through more than half of the states, and I think the only freeways I drove on were in California, Illinois, and New York.
Kenji.
Any chance you could post that journal?
My sister in law sent me a few pages of letters home by one of my mothers side of the family as he sailed north to Alaska in search of gold..
His lamentations about the habits of his fellow travellers were quite something..Every second line to his wife was he was never going to leave his Queenie again..
So Scientific American: completely untrustworthy when it comes to climate science, but totes pure as the driven snow when it comes to Wuhan coronavirus.
Gell-Mann amnesia again.
I just posted the following on Watts Up with That, it will also be part of a letter I’m writing to Premier Moe on hopefully lessons learned from this crisis and how government has responded.
___________________________________________________
One of the things that drives me nuts is the way the media, politicians and their bureaucrats are promoting the mass lock downs as evidence of success in ‘flattening the curve’ and thereby implying that they saved the world. But they have no real way to proving that.
So I thought I would look for some proxy to get some insight. And it seems to me that a good one would be comparison between the 2018-19 seasonal flu numbers and the 2019-20 season flu numbers. How the flu is transmitted is similar to how the Chinese flu is transmitted. Here are numbers from the province of SK from the official government website:
2018-2019 Flu Season in Saskatchewan 2,170 infections, 11 deaths (.0050 death rate)
2019-2020 Flu Season in Saskatchewan 2,547 infections, 15 deaths (.0058 death rate)
The only difference was the lockdown in 2019-20 (I believe the vaccination rates were about the same in both years in Saskatchewan). So basically there is NO difference in seasonal flu infections and deaths. With the lockdown in 2019-20 you would have expected to see a much lower rate of infection and deaths from the seasonal flu, but, alas no.
So the supposed curve flattening is pretty much a myth.
Any comments? I’m not a statistician, but I do have common sense.
BTY way, to date in Sk we have had 365 Covid19 infections and 5 deaths – for a death rate of a little over .0136 (more than the flu admittedly, but not enough to warrant shutting down the whole economy)
Trying to apply common sense to this data is frustrating. For instance the number of Flu Season in Saskatchewan Infections – how were these determined? By counting the number of people that got sick and reported it? Pretty weak I’d say. What about the people who didn’t report, and especially what about the possibility of people who were infected but didn’t get sick as is suggested for C19? It’s no wonder that people are becoming skeptical about the governments’ safety-first-at-any-cost posture.
The Doc makes a good point. I’ve personally known numerous people who have died from:
Motor vehicle accidents
Industrial accidents
Cancer
Heart attack
Stroke
Pneumonia
Murder (2 incidents, both relatives)
Brain aneurisms
But over the past 67 years (since I first started school) I have not known one person who died from flu.
How about one of the … “50,000 people who die each year from secondhand smoke”? Again … for the record … I loathe smoking. Don’t like being in bars that allow smoking. Have never smoked. Think smoking is a dirty, useless, dangerous habit … but. I hate FAKE … fabricated … statistics even more. Like how marijuana is … medicine. Puhleeze.
I think bullshit is the real killer.
100% WINNER!
The observations by the ER doctors are interesting. I have to note that I suspect most flu related deaths are in the elderly. How many die in ERs? I suspect many die in elder care facilities.
I would like to see total deaths plotted versus time. Kate was gracious enough to post a link several days ago. However, that site shows current deaths versus average deaths for the last five years. It doesn’t show the worst flu year in day the last 30 or 50 years and it should. You’d have to put that year’s population in spreadsheet and calculate deaths per million population, but that shouldn’t be hard.
You’d also want to show total deaths for places like New York and Montreal.
Do I think this is worse than a typical flu year. Yes. The data shows this.
Is it worse than a bad flu year? We don’t yet know, and that is the problem.
sorry joe but no it is not worse.
Not sure about Canada, but the U.S. has had one of the worst flu seasons in years.
https://www.statista.com/chart/20704/us-flu-seasons-percent-of-samples-tested-positive/
OWG
Here are some plots of total deaths per week from ALL causes, versus the average total deaths from the last five years.
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c
Something is causing those deaths.
joe, the fatality rate is still less than two tenths of one prevent. Find whatever you wish but it does not alter the facts on the ground.
Joe,
Something is causing those deaths.
Exactly. Well put.
Dear Doc
Ever been to an Old Folks Home in the winter? Every year they get a visit from the old man’s friend.
The friend doesn’t present in emergency residency or places where there is an attending physician.
Is it time to talk about end-game strategy for C19. Consider the safety-at-all-cost approach: Hunker down wait for vaccine. What, 18 months to 4 years? Might be ok as long you have the internet and food supply chain. But with no guarantee of a vaccine ever, maybe better to risk dying of C19. So any plan short of a vaccine requires risk management – what are my chances of getting sick versus what loss of freedom of action I’m prepared to tolerate.
The more society becomes dependent on vaccines, the more society WILL become dependent on vaccines. We need to actually get rid of products that make us cleaner and more antiseptic to allow our immune systems to stay functional. It is, after all, additional sanitary conditions that led to the polio outbreaks in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s….the polio antibodies that had been transmitted from mother to child in utero were pretty much gone leaving that generation open for the outbreak.
Glasnost, yes.
End game strategy is vital, waiting for vaccine seems obvious dangerous hail Mary gamble, at best.
How to proceed with abundance of caution, but still proceed?
Growing evidence that locking down flattens curves… but also economies. Data on the fallout from economic destruction naturally lags.
We’re in the phony war calm before the storms.
If we have no effect plan, when we’re forced to abandon lockdown & we will be forced at some point, we will simply be weaker & more vulnerable to whatever comes next.
We need a better plan than Trudeau Tam.
ER doctors treat emergency cases, they are not the attending Doctor on an applicable ward- so yes statistically it’s true they don’t see many deaths because those deaths are registered via the ICU or other units. A friend was admitted to the hospital with the flu, his cause of death at 52 was death via a respiratory virus or super bug. Potatoes Potato-I really loath reading opinion pieces tarted up as science. If you aren’t coding in the ER your death is registered to the applicable ward not the doctor in ER, if you get admitted your family doctor is your doctor of reference not the ER doctor unless requested.
On a related issue, what did Tam know and when did Tam know it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4OyeLmTIRQ
When all else fails, practice CYA….
Forget CDC data. It is useless for real world purposes.
Take a look at this:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc807/fig1/line/index.html
Its data from the UK Office of National Statistics. It plots the five year average deaths from flu/pneumonia and deaths this year from same, as well as COVID-19.
You can clearly see that flu has been fairly predictable, and relatively low numbers. It continues to be so this year, but COVID-19 is way, way worse.
BTW: The anti-Trump crap is because of where this was published. It’s like articles on climate change, which have to contain phrases like “worse than we thought” and “all due to climate change” to get published.
This guy looks at more than the average, or the last 5 year average for pneumonia.
No doubt it is real, and it is bad, but by isolating it to this year, or to the last 5 years allows people to use stats to make their point. Here is one making another point by looking back a bit more and finding flu seasons in the 1990s that were pretty bad in the UK.
http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/
In the opening section:
“Draconian lockdowns were not considered necessary then, why are they now?”
Well, those numbers that he is looking at are for a disease for which a large part of the population has at least some immunity, either from prior exposure, or vaccination. The numbers for COVID-19 look somewhat similar, WITH LOCKDOWN. Think what it would be like if left to run its natural course.
There is no way to prove that a lock down was the right thing. There is also no way to disprove it.
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/04/62572/?fbclid=IwAR2CuZ6A6x6IVHizZJJgyvgXe1q-bK6mrQ0w56cUb4Y8nrHf8H6cR2brxfI
This person makes a case against lock downs, but not against other measures.
Dwayne, good find.
Thanks for this!
Phillip, I didn’t really see any anti-Trump BS, just that he mentioned that Trump had said, “The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year. That was shocking to me.”
Trump was just repeating what he’d been told by CDC. He was wrong, that’s way too high. It’s not anti-Trump to say so, especially since he’d gone to great lengths to point out that the CDC, who gave Trump those numbers, was using models and estimates rather than actual numbers.
“We now know that Trump was disastrously wrong about the threat that the coronavirus posed to the United States. But his take that the cited numbers of flu deaths were incredible? On that, he was spot-on.”
I feel a touch of TDS in dear doctors spiel,especially after he notes,earlier,President Trump is citing CDC estimates..
Like I said,he does not know the Denominator,admits he does not know the denominator and then goes on to conclude “Yes indeed the Wuh Hoo Flu is the new black plague”.
I suspect this graduate of modern education figures 1/0 equals infinity.
Has anyone else noted a certain reluctance to test the rest of the population?
If the antibody tests keep experiencing problems and failures,I might start to suspect they do not want to know..
What are the political implications if the Covid Wolf turns out to be a Chicken?
Past flu fatalities (US) from the CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html
COVID-19 death rate starts looking like being similar to that from flu.
Suddenly:
Flu death rate is nonsense overestimate!
Exactly. And it’s exactly bullish!t.
Covid death rates are not even close to that of the flu — they’re exponentially higher. In Canada the number of dead per confirmed/probable infected has been in the 6-8% range.
So long as these canards keep being thrown around, no progress toward a solution is possible. Stop hanging your hopes on provably false statements. It does not advance the discussion, and it makes the right look as deranged as the Russian Collusion community.
Covid death rates are not even close to that of the flu — they’re exponentially higher.
The death rate depends on the number of infections. We do not know what that number is so we cannot say for sure what the death rate is. Most death rate estimates so far have compared deaths with confirmed, tested cases – mostly hospital cases. As the results from community antibody tests start to come in all over the world, it is clear that the actual number of infections is vastly greater. And the death rate does indeed start to look closer to a bad flu year than the once-a-century horror pandemic that was feared.
This isn’t a provably false statement, it’s based on more up to date information. New data always advances the discussion.
SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 / Communist-Act-of-War-Virus disagreement transcends the left – right divide. It’s one of the fascinating things to watch as a diversion during this grim progression.
Just to be clear, I’m talking death rate. SARS-CoV-2 appears to be more infectious than flu, there is little to no immunity in naïve populations, and there is no vaccine. For this first season of COVID-19, numbers of deaths will almost certainly be greater than any regular flu season (including bad ones). But we don’t appear to be in 1918 territory.
Sweden style mitigation is justified to keep things under control.
yes every time there is evidence the covid19 is no worse than the flu
either the media tells us a baby died of it or tell us doctor died of it ( emotions replaces statistics for most people )
or we are told we can not trust numbers that say the covid19 is not that deadly
but we must absolutely fully totally completely and BLINDLY trust ANY numbers
that say the covid19 is as deadly as the black plague
only numbers that feed the covid panic should be believed
yeah right
The good doctor should have talked to my wife. She’s now retired but she worked in major hospitals for 45 years, first as an RN then ending up as a hospital administrator. Flu deaths, aka the old man’s friend: she has seen plenty of it.
I would also ask the good doctor how many patients does a pediatrician see who have senile dementia? Hint: it’s a trick question.
If I may borrow a line from the movie Moneyball: You have medical specialists and below them you have general practitioners, then you have 50 ft of crap and then you have epidemiologists.
its a lie that many people die from the flu ?
and its a lie that many people die from covid19?
so in both cases the number of people dying is vastly inflated?
then it does not matter if one is apple and the other is oranges ;
in both cases what we are told are lies
Aren’t most flu deaths taking place in nursing homes? Or even at home? Just because the flu patients aren’t dying in the ER in front of this doctor, does that mean they don’t exist? It may be rare for a child to die of the flu, but this doctor admits he had a young flu patient die.
This is a young doctor I see. God help us.
//
Terry
8500 died last year in canada from the flu?
Apples or oranges that will be double the Chinese flu casualties
Reply
Maureen from Regina
Today Canada’s death total from Covid19 is 2,852.
We had better get cracking – we have long way to go before we pass deaths from seasonal flu.
//
Folks, read this:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1252637412309651456.html
A selection of fragments;
//
It is often said there are 60,000 flu deaths in the United States
We are approaching 60,000 COVID deaths for the USA and I expect we will get there on or before 1 May.
So — at that point — it will have equaled the flu season, right? WRONG.
The 60,000 flu death per year number comes from a model.
A statistical model, examining excess winter mortality and coming up with a number.
On the other hand, the 60,000 COVID deaths that we are rapidly approaching in the USA is a direct tally.
It is NOT from an excess-mortality model. It is a count.
On a like-for-like basis, flu deaths would be approx 15,000 per year.
//
He goes on to describe the various considerations that go into the final numbers.
//
When the dust settles and we have the final mortality data for 2020,
we can study how COVID mortality stacks up to flu on a like-for-like basis.
Spoiler: the number will be higher than our tally-numbers.
At the population level, there will be FOUR TYPES of #COVID19 #mortality:
1) Direct-direct
2) Direct-indirect
3) Indirect
4) Competing risks
In this short thread, I will discuss the four.
//
ETC
the covid deaths tally is doctored ( no pun intended)
the CDC and the WHO both have published documents that clearly say ; no testing, no confirmation required, if you think it was covid then just write covid on death certificate.
over 80 % of those people had serious health problems, they would have died of the flu or of an indigestion or of something else
the covid tally is artificially inflated.
even Birx admited to that
Please, I posted this above, I will post it here again. Perhaps you missed it, or you ignored it?
National Vitals Statistics Report
Deaths: Final Data for 2017
Page 6 Table B, not an estimate.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf
As Dwayne shows us ; those are ACTUAL numbers and not an estimate
it means the scientific American article is thus fake news
but I knew it was fake news the second it started to bash Trump
I have never seen a Trump hater say an honest thing
If you follow the thread I posted you will see reference to the codes used to classify causes of death:
The thread reader didn’t catch the codes thread: here it is
https://twitter.com/AndrewNoymer/status/1241620288825167874
Including WHO’s emergency CV codes:
https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/covid19/en/
From the CDC article:
Cause-of-death classification
The mortality statistics presented in this report were compiled in accordance with World Health Organization (WHO) regulations, which specify that member countries classify and code causes of death in accordance with the current revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). ICD provides the basic guidance used in virtually all countries to code and classify causes of death.
This bit is sad:
Conclusions—The age-adjusted death rate for the total, male, and female populations increased from 2016 to 2017
and life expectancy at birth decreased in 2017 for the total and male populations.
The old mans friend was not called the flu or anything like it. It was called natural causes which it was. Everyone dies of something but now statistics mean money for organizations like the cancer or heart foundations and fat salaries for the CEO.
Looks like Kate is trolling her own blog
Seasonal flu deaths are estimated using models. TDS does not change this.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm
Excess deaths tell the story. Don’t let the (justified) suspicion of leftist views blind us from the real situation.
https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c
And don’t compare flu cases/deaths for a full year to Wu Flu in 6 weeks.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-kills-more-americans-in-one-month-than-the-flu-kills-in-one-year/?utm_source=whatfinger
Another pet peeve of mine — Sweden 231.3 deaths per M population vs Norway 38.3 deaths per M population. Sweden’s approach to handling Wu Flu is NOT as effective as its neighbor’s way of aggressively fighting the disease.
I refer you to the the CDC vital statistics above. Please, have a look, they don’t lie.
“Data in this report are based on information from all resident death certificates filed in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. More than 99% of deaths occurring in this country are believed to be registered (4).”
Sweden v Norway v Finland. Sure, their neighbours are doing great. How about Sweden v France v Spain v Italy v UK. If it was as bad as they say, all that no lock down stuff, they should be far worse than the worst of the worst. Why are they so much better off than those countries.
Another thing, why is the Northern Hemisphere taking the hardest hit? Check out the equatorial and African countries. Someone smarter than I should look into this. You have to wonder how Africa, with all of the work that China has been doing there, is not suffering to the same degree as Europe, or the USA.
“based on” means it’s the starting seed for the model(s) used to ESTIMATE flu deaths. Read the whole CDC description. They even estimate how many deaths/cases are without medical care and are not recorded as flu caused.
I am going to assume you have not clicked on the link provided above to the actual PDF document housed on the CDC website.
The damn thing stating it is actual death certificate data that is found in the document. What is so hard to understand?
Not an estimate. This is the real number from the real Vital Statistics Report from 2017.
8. Influenza and pneumonia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .(J09–J18) – 55,672
Page 6 Table B.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf
I guess I will have to reply that I don’t think you have read the CDC description in the first link I posted. This is a quote from the intro of the CDC document on how they derive their numbers:
“CDC uses a mathematical model to estimate the numbers of influenza illnesses, medical visits, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States, (1-4) as well as, the impact of influenza vaccination on these numbers.”
Another pet peeve of mine — Sweden 231.3 deaths per M population vs Norway 38.3 deaths per M population. Sweden’s approach to handling Wu Flu is NOT as effective as its neighbor’s way of aggressively fighting the disease.
Norway is not aggressively fighting the disease, it is merely postponing the disease (at great cost). Norway will face the pain of those inevitable deaths eventually. On the other side of this pandemic the Swedish approach will be seen to be the most sensible, least worst scenario (there is no best case scenario in this).
For all those arguing about how the estimate could be wrong… you really need to read the whole thing. I linked you to the death certificate numbers from 2017. From the link given by Lynn Erickson to the CDC website:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm
“Why doesn’t CDC base its seasonal flu mortality estimates only on death certificates that specifically list influenza?
Seasonal influenza may lead to death from other causes, such as pneumonia, congestive heart failure, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It has been recognized for many years that influenza is underreported on death certificates. There may be several reasons for underreporting, including that patients aren’t always tested for seasonal influenza virus infection, particularly older adults who are at greatest risk of seasonal influenza complications and death. Even if a patient is tested for influenza, influenza virus infection may not be identified because the influenza virus is only detectable for a limited number of days after infection and many people don’t seek medical care in this interval. Additionally, some deaths – particularly among those 65 years and older – are associated with secondary complications of influenza (including bacterial pneumonias). For these and other reasons, modeling strategies are commonly used to estimate flu-associated deaths. Only counting deaths where influenza was recorded on a death certificate would be a gross underestimation of influenza’s true impact.”
Dwayne, if all flu related deaths were reported as the whoowho flu has been, the world would have to shut down forever.
We still seem to be missing the main problem.
How to properly deal with the chi-com-covid & its myriad geo political, socio economic & health effects?
We don’t have a luxury of time, we can’t afford to stay hunkered down forever.
We have no plan on how to safely, as quickly as practical, get out of lockdown.
Watch dark horse podcast 11.
“We have no plan on how to safely, as quickly as practical, get out of lockdown”
Exactly. We’re facing a SAFETY—EXPEDIENCY risk spectrum. At the SAFETY end we wait for a vaccine (which may never come), at the EXPEDIENCY end we go back to total freedom immediately. The balance point is different for each person. Unfortunately the current debate is not giving us the information we need to make a sensible risk assessment.