Quote:
Originally Posted by dktshb
Then again if we didn't treat each new strain of the flu as new statistics I suppose the flu by far is most deadly.
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The accounting of covid deaths is different from the historical approach to influenza. In the past if somebody got seriously ill and showed up in the hospital they might have an influenza test. If they randomly got mildly ill or their friend was sick chances were low that they would be tested for influenza. These days there's mass screening for covid and if somebody dies after a positive test their death is typically considered a covid death. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with this if the context is understood but these counts aren't all comparable.
If somebody invented a clinically harmless virus that was good at replicating and we applied the covid standard to it, it would be implicated in a lot of deaths.
It's a tricky subject because on the one hand you've got people arguing covid did not cause significant excess mortality in say the United States (it did, far beyond a bad flu season), but then other people who seem to want to over-estimate the impact.
Then there is the reality of immune senescence and the fact that many people ultimately die from some pathogen, so a death of a frail 92 year old is not really the same as a healthy 20 year old dying. This is a political third rail so it gets ignored. Likewise statistics tend to mix in deaths of people with severe comorbidities with healthy people, like healthy 5-11 year olds with 5-11 year olds who are morbidly obese with diabetes or dying of cancer. This screws up the risk calculus for everybody (exaggerates for healthy people, underexaggerates for at-risk).