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No, literally look at the CDC links I provided. It says "Estimated COVID-19 Infections, Symptomatic Illnesses, and Hospitalizations—United States" - 91 million

The key is estimated. Most covid cases go unreported.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

discuss

stopping|5 years ago

Well, let's use the CDC estimates for comparison:

  Estimated flu infections per season: ~25,000,000
  Confirmed COVID cases last 12 months: ~22,000,000
  Estimated COVID cases using 7x reporting ratio (CDC): ~154,000,000

If we compare CDC estimates for both diseases, COVID is 6 times more infectious than the flu. So, CFR doesn't tell the whole story, and it is disingenuous to pretend that it does. I think your original comment calculated an estimated CFR of 0.278% for COVID (253k deaths divided by 91M cases by end of November), while the estimated CFR for the flu is 0.16% (40k deaths divided by 25M cases per season). Using these numbers, the CFR of COVID is 1.7 times that of the flu. But, when multiplied by the infectiousness, it kills 10 times as many people. A comparison of the absolute death toll matches this result:

  Estimated flu deaths per season: ~40,000
  Confirmed COVID deaths last 12 months: 360,000

Note that the number of COVID deaths is under-representative because several months accounted for a period of low-spread, whereas flu is already endemic in the population. COVID was roughly considered widespread in April, so that's 9 months of full-on proliferation with 356,000 deaths. Extrapolating for the next three months projects ~475,000 deaths from April 2020 thru March 2021. This is probably an underestimate because if the next two months are like December (as projected), we'll hit just over 500,000 deaths. Now, we don't even know how many COVID deaths are unreported, but for the sake of argument we can just pretend that this is negligible.

So, even a modest estimate of projected deaths also confirms that COVID over 10 times deadlier than the flu in absolute terms.

covidthrow3|5 years ago

It does spread faster than the flu, but the CFR is not that much different than the flu like you said. I'm not afraid of the flu and most people I know are not. How about instead of shutting down the entire economy and destroying many people's lives, we say to the people that are afraid of it to isolate? The government could have paid for them to receive their groceries through an app. It probably would have been cheaper than the massive amount of money spent trying to get the economy to recover after destroying it. Most of the deaths are in nursing homes so we should have quarantined nursing homes also instead of destroying the entire economy. That probably would have cut the deaths by at least 50%. The average healthy person has nothing to fear from COVID.

I've been to many large parties, I went to 3 Stop the Steal protests (and came into contact with probably 10,000 people easily), I never wear a mask, I take no precautions and I'm fine.