Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges: Scientific American

[Alex4Martinez]

Just one more way Trump misleads the people. Don't be misled.
FACT:
Counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620

Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges

In late February, when the stock market was beginning to fall over coronavirus fears, President Donald Trump held a briefing at the White House to reassure people that there was little chance of the virus causing significant disruption in the United States.

“I want you to understand something that shocked me when I saw it,” he said. “The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year. That was shocking to me.”

His point was to suggest that the coronavirus was no worse than the flu, whose toll of deaths most of us apparently barely noticed.

The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/

[Squinch]

1. Here's more from the article, which should be required reading for EVERYONE

because the CDC numbers for flu are wild, ridiculous guesses that don't come close to reflecting reality:

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.

[Alex4Martinez]

2. Thanks, and credit to the Tom Hartmann show.

Earbuds and Facebook Live make my morning walks very interesting.

[Squinch]

3. .

[dalton99a]

4. Kick

[GemDigger]

5. Kick

[Johnny2X2X]

6. US has 29% of global the deaths, for H1N1 we had 4%

Hey, remember H1N1, Obama's early presidency's pandemic? Trump couldn't shut up about the 12,000 US deaths from it for weeks. Well, those 12,000 US deaths represented 4% of the globes total deaths from H1N1. Right now, Trump's 100,000 deaths from Covid-19 represents 29% of the world's total deaths.

Different bugs with different fatality rates, but compared to the rest of the world, we did way way better in 2009. Why? Why didn't the US under Obama account for 29% of the global deaths from H1N1?

Might not even be a valid comparison, but it didn't stop them from bringing up the Swine Flu all of February to try to make Obama's response to it look bad compared to Covid-19. but the fact is that we performed way better in 2009 than in 2020 compared to the rest of the world.

[Hortensis]

7. Thanks a whole bunch for this enlightening info, Alex.

Thanks to the author for writing and you for posting a direct link to the "primary" SciAm source.

I was editing medical documents during a serious flu epidemic in the 20-oughts. I was of course entirely aware that it made a whole lot of people so ill they required hospitalization but a dearth of associated death reports was just good. They mostly got well and were discharged. From then to now I never connected the dots between what was going on in my little handful of hospitals and the national figures we all read.

Btw, I notice those greatly expanded CDC estimates are used in other SciAm articles, considered valid for their purposes. But like trying to compare a pickup bed of apples to a bag of oranges that even the comparatively simply augmented body counts some states are reporting would be.