It’s tempting to cite
U.S. COVID-19 deaths
and wonder why we
ignored ordinary influenza
deaths in past years.
The seasonal flu produces
fatalities primarily because
it emerges in constantly
'varying strains.
A median of 30 million
Americans are infected
by the seasonal flu each year,
with a claimed median
of about 38,000 fatalities.
The worst episode
in the past decade,
according to the Centers
for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC),
was the 2017-2018 season,
with an estimated
'45 million cases,
and 61,000 fatalities.
But ...
the actual CONFIRMED
cases of influenza deaths
in the US are only
3,000 – 15,000 annually.
COVID-19 is on
a different scale.
The headline grabbing
flu numbers are modeled
guesses, based
on assumptions,
about things like
how many people
go to the hospital,
how many get tested,
and what other diseases
were around at the time.
It’s a statistic called the
Influenza Disease Burden.
There is no list of names
of actual people who died
from the flu.
The biggest "adjustment"
is that pneumonia is
bundled in with influenza,
when it could have
two dozen other causes!
A whole range of viral,
bacterial, and
mycoplasma-related
pneumonia cases
get collected under
the “influenza” banner.
Death is often multifactorial.
Both ordinary flu
and COVID flu contribute
to heart attacks and strokes.
Without a $5,000 autopsy
for every patient
— which won’t be done —
we won’t know if the
heart attack was 25%
caused by COVID-19,
or 75%.
And people who die
in their homes
will never be tested.
There will be
heart attacks
labeled as “COVID”,
that shouldn’t have been,
and COVID deaths labeled
as heart attacks, that never
got tested for COVID.
The biggest problem,
appears to be
the statistics
for deaths from
ordinary flu strains:
Doctor Jeremy Faust
could remember only
one person who had died
from the flu.
"Comparing COVID-19 Deaths
to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing
Apples to Orange"
Jeremy Samuel Faust,
Scientific American
" …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 … Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single [flu death] 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.
He calculates that in the worst ever week of both covid and flu deaths, the confirmed COVID-19 deaths were 10 to 44 times higher: 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 is far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.
… we have to compare counted deaths to counted deaths, not counted deaths to wildly inflated statistical estimates. If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu."
Lawrence Solomon
wrote in 2014 that the CDC
were inflating flu numbers
as a way to market flu vaccines.
Don’t Believe Everything
You Read About Flu Deaths
Lawrence Solomon,
Huffington Post.
“U.S. data on influenza deaths are a mess,” states a 2005 article in the British Medical Journal entitled “Are U.S. flu death figures more PR than science?” This article takes issue with the 36,000 flu-death figure commonly claimed, and with describing “influenza/pneumonia” as the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.
“But why are flu and pneumonia bundled together?” the article asks. “Is the relationship so strong or unique to warrant characterizing them as a single cause of death?”
Dr. David Rosenthal,
director of Harvard University
Health Services, said:
“People don’t necessarily die, per se, of the [flu] virus — the viraemia. What they die of is a secondary pneumonia.”
"The CDC itself acknowledges the slim relationship, saying “only a small proportion of deaths… only 8.5 per cent of all pneumonia and influenza deaths [are] influenza-related.”
“Cause-of-death statistics are based solely on the underlying cause of death [internationally defined] as ‘the disease or injury which initiated the train of events leading directly to death,’” explains the National Center for Health Statistics. Because the flu was rarely an “underlying cause of death,” the CDC created the sound-alike term, “influenza-associated death.”
Using this new, loose definition, CDC’s computer models could tally people who died of a heart ailment or other causes after having the flu. As William Thompson of the CDC’s National Immunization Program admitted, influenza-associated mortality is “a statistical association … I don’t know that we would say that it’s the underlying cause of death.”
Can government bureaucrats,
who hyped flu deaths,
be trusted on COVID-19
death counts ?