I think it is important to keep in mind that Covid-19 is still contained to some extent due to various measures. The influenza numbers are for the most part without any behaviour changes or rules (the influenza season ended roughly when Covid started to spread). The Covid-19 deaths would be higher if it were able to spread unhindered through the entire population.
And even in this somewhat unfair comparison Covid caused three times as many deaths.
Influenza is contained because there is some form of herd immunity already. Remember COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus, which is why it's spread so much so fast, no one is immune at first. But to suggest that the covid death numbers will be this high year after year after year is unlikely in my opinion, as is shown by the fact that many places with big first waves (north italy, sweden, london) don't have a second wave (especially in death numbers).
It's, also, important to keep in mind that Influenza has a vaccination, which is very cheap and many elderly people take it. Yet, many die from it (and it doesn't make any headlines).
We are at the end just comparing apples to oranges. It would be really interesting to make such comparisons if we hadn't any vaccination for Influenza.
It’s also contained because unleashing it would totally overwhelm almost any nation’s hospitals, cause a cascading death toll because no treatment could be given.
This is pretty damming to anyone who claims "its just the flu":
“More than three times as many deaths were recorded between January and August this year where COVID-19 was the underlying cause compared to influenza and pneumonia."
“The mortality rate for COVID-19 is also significantly higher than influenza and pneumonia rates for both 2020 and the five-year average."
“Since 1959, which is when ONS monthly death records began, the number of deaths due to influenza and pneumonia in the first eight months of every year have been lower than the number of COVID-19 deaths seen, so far, in 2020.”
The number of deaths from flu, pneumonia, and Covid are about 50% higher than the year 2000 (Jan-Aug) and about 25% higher than the year 1983. Do those numbers justify draconian shutdowns and bankrupting half of humanity? I'm not so sure. In the early days, we believed that Covid was 10-20 times deadlier than the flu, and that's what was used to justify the draconian measures.
Note also these numbers are for the UK, one of the top worst countries hit in terms of deaths per million in the world.
Also, Covid does not seem to have the same seasonality that the flu has, which peaks in cold winter months. It may therefore not be altogether accurate to merely compare Jan-Aug. We may need the whole year's data to better compare.
The confusion lies in "just the flu". Actual Influenza is in fact quite dangerous.
However, we need to compare COVID-19 to Influenza to get some perspective. I would argue that Influenza is worse than COVID, for the simple reason that it kills more young people and children. The average age of a COVID fatality is higher than life expectancy. Influenza destroys more years of life.
We also need to make a distinction between the time frame in which the virus was new and killed a disproportionate amount of susceptible people, versus the time frame we are in now, where the virus is once again kills less people than Influenza - as the data clearly shows, though it isn't highlighted in the publication.
Just look at the daily and monthly numbers. April was absolutely horrific, with daily deaths spiking at 15x and April at more than 10x. Lockdowns flattened the curve, care improved, mask wearing improved, and overall better hygiene, particularly at nursing homes. The overall death rate is going down because the age demographic of infection has changed as well. Basically, it's hitting more younger people and older people are taking more precautions.
Surely it's much more complicated than this? Assuming the COVID-19 assigned deaths are accurately labelled, how many COVID-19 deaths would have been pneumonia/influenza deaths? How many pneumonia/influenza deaths from 2021, 2022, ... have been brought forward to 2020? How much has the lockdown contributed to poor immune systems? Which age groups are affected more, were they already at life expectancy? It's obviously not the flu but it seems clear it will be years before we understand what the impact really is.
> This is pretty damming to anyone who claims "its just
> the flu"
Any discussion about the COVID deaths that does not take age into account is not worth the time. For the younger population it may actually look better than the flu.
- Influenza and Pneumonia are counted as one, because the majority of Pneumonia deaths are due to Influenza
- Influenza and Pneumonia deaths have been SUBSTANTIALLY lower ever single month in 2020 than the five year average
- Of the deaths where both influenza and pneumonia, and COVID-19 were mentioned on the death certificate, the underlying cause of death was counted as COVID-19 in 95.8%
So basically this alone already highlights the gross overestimation of COVID-19 deaths. I feels plain wrong to attribute almost all deaths to COVID-19 when the person also had Influenza when it is evident that we've seen so many less Influenza deaths this year. Clearly we're not giving Influenza enough credit in being the cause of death which is wrong IMHO.
Also further below when you look at the age distribution, the vast majority of deaths happened in 80+ year olds, even more in 84+ year olds, which makes one really think. COVID-19 is not nearly as much of a threat to the vast majority of the population as we are made to believe. It seems the people who are dying from COVID-19 are those who have reached an age which is well beyond the average life expectancy of a first world country.
Not saying that COVID-19 isn't a threat, it is, but it's not like the Spanish flu which was killing predominantly young people or the plague which was wiping people of all age groups.
Note that despite what you might think, Swedes do socially distance. So if they have what looks like a bad flu season despite all the changes to everyday life you can assume that it's at the very least worse than influenza for which no such restrictions are done.
Are there instances of hospitals corridors turning into morgues in recent years due to Influenza?
If Covid-19 is not worse than the Influenza we should have similar impact due to influenza.
I was not able to confirm that Influenza creates similar strain to healthcare infrastructure as Covid-19 which makes me think that the Covid-19 situation in Sweden is more nuanced than the numbers say.
Even if this data was correct, the difference is that in 2020 there were pretty stringent measures in place to reduce the spread of Covid (which were not in place in the past for major influenza outbreaks). We do not have a clean counterfactual to what the number of deaths would be in the absence of those measures, but the height of the outbreak in Italy can perhaps serve as some approximation, and there the excess mortality was orders of magnitude above previous years.
Have a look at those dates along the bottom of the charts.
COVID dates are in spring, Flu is the middle of winter. TBF we don't have data on what COVID is like in the winter so the jury is still (a little bit) out on what that looks like but this comparison is misleading.
I bet if you plotted Flu for those dates (i.e. in spring) you would see significantly fewer deaths than from COVID.
While interpreting this it's worth noting that the influenza season in the UK is typically October-May with the peak period December-March. So the 2020 numbers for influenza are missing 25% of the typical peak period and 3/8 of the whole influenza season.
I'm not a statistician or a scientist, but I don't it does any good to lump everything together over the past ~9 months and compare it to Influenza and Pneumonia.
Just think about it.
We barely knew anything about covid or how to treat it at the start of the year. Now, it seems like we have a better understanding and how to potentially treat it.
Compare this to Influenza/Pneumonia, which I'm just guessing we've been studying for much longer and already have treatments for.
You could probably add some sort of moving average 50 days and 200 days to provide a clearer picture of how we are currently doing.
Why make this point and ask for a moving average? The fact that it is new and unknown is part of why it is deadly, and that is reflected in the statistics. Why try to erase one takeaways from this set of statistics?
> Now, it seems like we have a better understanding and how to potentially treat it.
I think you're being a bit optimistic here. There've been some procedural improvements. We have a few drugs which appear to shorten hospital stay but not reduce death rate. We have dexamethasone, which gives something like a 20% death rate reduction in hospitalized cases, but is not otherwise super-useful.
There've been modest improvements in treatment, but no silver bullet yet.
Why not? Do you think the number of previously recorded deaths will suddenly decrease because we've found a better treatment? These people died, they should be included in the statistics.
So did they test every dying person on influenza, and if they died, cause of death was "influenza"? What if they tested positive for both influenza and Covid-19, what cause would be listed?
I'm just not convinced the comparison is very meaningful, as I suspect many more people were tested for Covid-19 than for influenza. The testing strategy may have been completely different, making the comparison meaningless.
Very difficult to compare this data. Flu deaths will be down this year because of all the additional precautions taken around transmission, which may disproportionately affect flu virality (ie. perhaps COVID still manages to transmit despite precautions while flu does not.) Then if you say okay compare a previous flu year, you’d have to compare with the same conditions, which in a typical year would be no masks, barriers, social distancing, etc. And I think we all know how much worse COVID would be if we weren’t taking any precautions - we were warned for months about it.
So I’d imagine the initial observations that COVID is about 3-4x as deadly as the flu (and not 10x+ as some of these numbers suggest) are probably accurate enough.
"Looking at the year-to-date (using the most up-to-date data we have available), the number of deaths up to 25 September 2020 was 453,771, which is 53,888 more than the five-year average."
Shouldn't the comparisons be based from percentages? Also - even with that I'd assume that the more the people, the more dynamic world we live in then the rate of transmission will increase (then the more deaths)
Some things to consider from looking at the raw data:
The 5-year average minimum of deaths from "Influenza and pneumonia" is about 50 cases per day. The average for 2020 is about half that. Adding up COVID fatalities and "Influeanza and pneumonia" after July comes to about 50 cases per day. In other words, there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July.
> there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July
Correct, and that correlates neatly with the number of recorded cases of covid19. One could even draw the conclusion that if less people have covid-19, less people are likely to die from it.
Largely because we locked down the entire country and had largely stopped community transmission by then I imagine. Now that lockdown has been lifted and what restrictions there are are increasingly being ignored we are seeing increased community transmission, a concomitant increase in hospital admissions and should start seeing an increase in deaths over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully this wave of deaths will be lower because we are better prepared and have better treatments, and also because the rise in infections is being driven by young people.
Thanks, I was already browsing the data set to look at the same thing. When, as a statistician, you already observe that "In 2020 deaths due to influenza and pneumonia were consistently lower than the five-year average in all months from January to August" you need to include the total figure for deaths of Influenza+Pneumonia+Covid19 to arrive at a meaningful comparison against previous years.
[+] [-] fabian2k|5 years ago|reply
And even in this somewhat unfair comparison Covid caused three times as many deaths.
[+] [-] zpeti|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WinstonSmith84|5 years ago|reply
We are at the end just comparing apples to oranges. It would be really interesting to make such comparisons if we hadn't any vaccination for Influenza.
[+] [-] prox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bb123|5 years ago|reply
“More than three times as many deaths were recorded between January and August this year where COVID-19 was the underlying cause compared to influenza and pneumonia."
“The mortality rate for COVID-19 is also significantly higher than influenza and pneumonia rates for both 2020 and the five-year average."
“Since 1959, which is when ONS monthly death records began, the number of deaths due to influenza and pneumonia in the first eight months of every year have been lower than the number of COVID-19 deaths seen, so far, in 2020.”
[+] [-] chrisco255|5 years ago|reply
Note also these numbers are for the UK, one of the top worst countries hit in terms of deaths per million in the world.
Also, Covid does not seem to have the same seasonality that the flu has, which peaks in cold winter months. It may therefore not be altogether accurate to merely compare Jan-Aug. We may need the whole year's data to better compare.
[+] [-] gridlockd|5 years ago|reply
However, we need to compare COVID-19 to Influenza to get some perspective. I would argue that Influenza is worse than COVID, for the simple reason that it kills more young people and children. The average age of a COVID fatality is higher than life expectancy. Influenza destroys more years of life.
We also need to make a distinction between the time frame in which the virus was new and killed a disproportionate amount of susceptible people, versus the time frame we are in now, where the virus is once again kills less people than Influenza - as the data clearly shows, though it isn't highlighted in the publication.
[+] [-] titzer|5 years ago|reply
COVID is not to be trifled with.
[+] [-] ryanjshaw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rimliu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdfkkksdfsdff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|5 years ago|reply
Looking at the source data, the numbers seem roughly right: https://knoema.de/atlas/Schweden/Sterblichkeitsrate
I don't know what to think anymore.
[+] [-] dustinmoris|5 years ago|reply
- Influenza and Pneumonia are counted as one, because the majority of Pneumonia deaths are due to Influenza
- Influenza and Pneumonia deaths have been SUBSTANTIALLY lower ever single month in 2020 than the five year average
- Of the deaths where both influenza and pneumonia, and COVID-19 were mentioned on the death certificate, the underlying cause of death was counted as COVID-19 in 95.8%
So basically this alone already highlights the gross overestimation of COVID-19 deaths. I feels plain wrong to attribute almost all deaths to COVID-19 when the person also had Influenza when it is evident that we've seen so many less Influenza deaths this year. Clearly we're not giving Influenza enough credit in being the cause of death which is wrong IMHO.
Also further below when you look at the age distribution, the vast majority of deaths happened in 80+ year olds, even more in 84+ year olds, which makes one really think. COVID-19 is not nearly as much of a threat to the vast majority of the population as we are made to believe. It seems the people who are dying from COVID-19 are those who have reached an age which is well beyond the average life expectancy of a first world country.
Not saying that COVID-19 isn't a threat, it is, but it's not like the Spanish flu which was killing predominantly young people or the plague which was wiping people of all age groups.
EDIT: Typos corrected.
[+] [-] the_mitsuhiko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|5 years ago|reply
If Covid-19 is not worse than the Influenza we should have similar impact due to influenza.
I was not able to confirm that Influenza creates similar strain to healthcare infrastructure as Covid-19 which makes me think that the Covid-19 situation in Sweden is more nuanced than the numbers say.
[+] [-] nebolo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrsPeaches|5 years ago|reply
COVID dates are in spring, Flu is the middle of winter. TBF we don't have data on what COVID is like in the winter so the jury is still (a little bit) out on what that looks like but this comparison is misleading.
I bet if you plotted Flu for those dates (i.e. in spring) you would see significantly fewer deaths than from COVID.
[+] [-] gridlockd|5 years ago|reply
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
Also, several countries show no excess mortality.
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _-___________-_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] born_a_skeptic|5 years ago|reply
Just think about it.
We barely knew anything about covid or how to treat it at the start of the year. Now, it seems like we have a better understanding and how to potentially treat it.
Compare this to Influenza/Pneumonia, which I'm just guessing we've been studying for much longer and already have treatments for.
You could probably add some sort of moving average 50 days and 200 days to provide a clearer picture of how we are currently doing.
[+] [-] noobermin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|5 years ago|reply
I think you're being a bit optimistic here. There've been some procedural improvements. We have a few drugs which appear to shorten hospital stay but not reduce death rate. We have dexamethasone, which gives something like a 20% death rate reduction in hospitalized cases, but is not otherwise super-useful.
There've been modest improvements in treatment, but no silver bullet yet.
[+] [-] tremon|5 years ago|reply
Why not? Do you think the number of previously recorded deaths will suddenly decrease because we've found a better treatment? These people died, they should be included in the statistics.
[+] [-] gizmondo|5 years ago|reply
Do we? It's mostly the same symptomatic treatment afaik, influenza antivirals are barely effective. The real difference is that there is a vaccine.
[+] [-] sdfkkksdfsdff|5 years ago|reply
I'm just not convinced the comparison is very meaningful, as I suspect many more people were tested for Covid-19 than for influenza. The testing strategy may have been completely different, making the comparison meaningless.
[+] [-] lwansbrough|5 years ago|reply
So I’d imagine the initial observations that COVID is about 3-4x as deadly as the flu (and not 10x+ as some of these numbers suggest) are probably accurate enough.
[+] [-] anotherevan|5 years ago|reply
"Looking at the year-to-date (using the most up-to-date data we have available), the number of deaths up to 25 September 2020 was 453,771, which is 53,888 more than the five-year average."
That’s just in England and Wales.
[+] [-] eithed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickJWagner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _bax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gridlockd|5 years ago|reply
The 5-year average minimum of deaths from "Influenza and pneumonia" is about 50 cases per day. The average for 2020 is about half that. Adding up COVID fatalities and "Influeanza and pneumonia" after July comes to about 50 cases per day. In other words, there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July.
[+] [-] KaiserPro|5 years ago|reply
Correct, and that correlates neatly with the number of recorded cases of covid19. One could even draw the conclusion that if less people have covid-19, less people are likely to die from it.
[+] [-] throwaway936482|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tremon|5 years ago|reply