Quote:
Originally Posted by ermax
The survival rate of the flu is about the same as COVID. Why don't we get guilted and pressured about the flu shot? "you may survive the flu but don't you care about everyone else". Why aren't there threads on freaking car forums titled "Why didn't you take your flu shot yet?". Why are people still so terrified with all we know about it now? Why are there people wearing masks in the car as they text while driving while also tailgating?
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As others have pointed out, this is inaccurate. It isn't even close. The seasonal flu kills mostly 80+ year olds, and the number of confirmed deaths is typically 15k/year with an estimate of true deaths around 35k/year, and that number is with no lockdowns and no masks, which means COVID deaths would be even higher. With that said, while we don't have a very high vaccination rate for the flu, most of the elderly get the flu shot, so the true death toll might be even higher. But here is the thing, the true death toll from COVID if we hadn't worn masks or done lockdowns or vaccinated people would have also been far higher, so we only have the current data to go off.
If we could eliminate all cancer or all heart disease with masks and social distancing, let's be honest, people wouldn't do it. We have had over 600k deaths from COVID, and this is a temporary problem and people are freaking out, so if masks meant the difference between no childhood cancer or your dad dying at 52 of a LAD, or anything else that pulls on your heart strings, but it meant wearing a mask and social distancing forever, people wouldn't do it, so why wear masks and social distance for COVID? Because 600k deaths is just a small amount of deaths relative to what COVID was capable of doing, and it is ludicrous to sacrifice so many lives for a year or two of inconvenience. I would wear masks indefinitely in social situations if it meant no cancer--just saying.
Here is all cause mortality, which I have posted ad nauseam, but it is worth a revisit I guess. As you can see, the 2018 flu season was bad, which is why you see it cross the standard deviation line, but for most winters, there is an extra 5k deaths per week at the peak compared to the low of the summer. For 2018, at the peak of the bad flu season, there was an extra 8k deaths beyond the typical rise in deaths. It is also worth noting that the flu season is a distinct season that comes and goes, but that is not the case for COVID
For COVID, there was an extra 27k deaths beyond what is normal during the peak of the last spike. Given a normal year, we would have had around 59,378, but instead we had 86,925--a difference of 27,547 excess deaths that week. That is a 46% increase in deaths. Said another way, 32% of all deaths from all causes came from COVID. If we were to compress the excess deaths into one giant bell curve then the excess deaths would equate to an extra 80k+ deaths during the peak week. Anyways, the chart speaks from itself, but I'm just trying to give some relative context.