Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

Reading the graph posted, you may think we stopped tracking the flu. However, it's not clear yet whether that is the case, and the charts from 2019 show that.

Here are the charts for 2019 and 2020 in the US*: https://imgur.com/a/HvBJoj2 (Note the axes are on different time scales unfortunately).

They are very similar with two major exceptions.

1. Week 13, about March 23rd, there is a dip lower, presumably due to the lock downs.

2. There was no activity throughout this spring and summer, but that's typically the case as the 2019 chart shows. 2020 is even lower (virtually no cases). While this could be due to lack of reporting, it could also be due to social distancing and masking.

We are currently in Week 44 of 2020. During week 44 of 2019 cases began to uptick slightly and then increased parabolically into the winter. We should expect the same in 2020. And this will be how we really know if flu testing is suppressed. Anyone claiming anything otherwise is speculating.

Anecdotally, my sister caught a bug recently that tested negative for COVID, and the physician suspected the flu. However, he couldn't test for flu since there was no capacity for flu testing.

Source: https://apps.who.int/flumart/Default?ReportNo=7

Note the different horizontal axes been the graphs. The top one goes back up after week 43/44 which is about where the bottom one ends.

I know your text describes this but it's easy to look at the graphs and miss!

I was about to post the same but both horizontal and vertical axes are different scales.

I just updated my comment to clarify too. Unfortunately, the WHO only plots data for weeks that have occurred, so there's no way to extend match the two axes.

In short: it is too earlier for 2020 (week 43 is almost nothing in 2019)

The 2019 graph shows nicely that the 2019/2020 flu seasons saw a lot of Influenza B cases, which was not as much present in 2018/2019. AFAIK Influenza B has always been the more severe and deadly type of the flu and to skeptics like myself this underlines even more the suspicion that we have falsly attributed a lot of deaths in our last Winter to COVID when it might have been the flu in many cases. Previous studies have already proven that when a patient had tested positive for the flu and COVID that all these cases have been only counted as COVID deaths. Things like this make it problematic to build trust in the wider population and ask people to follow silly rules when there is so much ground for mistrust in the severity of COVID.

There were virtually no deaths attributed to COVID last winter - everything started in March, past the influenza peak.

This winter the number of deaths from COVID will be an order of magnitude higher than the deaths from flu on an average tear. So even if we attributed every sobgle death from flu to covid, it wouldn’t change the overall picture on Covid really.

Testing didn't really start until March, so you can't possibly know the answer to that.

We're already back to average death levels (maybe even below average if the recent provisional numbers hold up):

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

Click "percent of expected deaths" column to see.

We thought Covid was an order of magnitude deadlier than the flu, but it's looking more and more like that's not the case. Covid may have hit a large population of vulnerable people with weak immune systems at once, and is currently becoming less deadly as it spreads among younger, healthier populations.

Covid had the element of surprise in the spring, for both immune systems and healthcare systems. Going forward, unless it mutates into some hellish form, it's not likely to continue.

I hope you are right.

But from your link : is important to note that it can take several weeks for death records to be submitted to National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), processed, coded, and tabulated. Therefore, the data shown on this page may be incomplete, and will likely not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period, especially for the more recent time periods.

I'd be a little careful with that chart. I was working with the raw data provided on this page: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm, and the CDC warns that even the data going back into August may be incomplete. I'd assume this data comes with the same caveat, so we may well see these numbers increase the reporting comes in.

Edit: from the asterisk on the page you linked: "*Data during this period are incomplete because of the lag in time between when the death occurred and when the death certificate is completed, submitted to NCHS and processed for reporting purposes. This delay can range from 1 week to 8 weeks or more, depending on the jurisdiction and cause of death."

why do you say "silly rules"?

I grant that there is, in principle, a possibility that health authorities are wrong and that these rules are not necessary because the problem has been inflated as you said.

Also, there is the possibility that, in principle, the rules themselves are ineffective.

However, if the rules are wrong, that's even more so a problem of COVID is a real problem.

If COVID has been overinflated, then the problem is not that the rules are silly but that they are not necessary (and thus their negative sideffects are worse than the benefits).

Colouring the rules themselves as "silly" only reveals a bias in your argument and probably will reduce the effectiveness in communicating your point to those in a different echo chamber.

> Is COVID a real problem?

Not to the vast majority in every age category.

I personally had COVID and it was less severe than the last time I had the flu, so why should I treat COVID different than the flu or care at all?

> Are the current rules effective?

Not in liberal democracies, that's what the data shows. If you live in an authoritarian regime where people are willing to completely give up their lives then it is effective, but at that point you might argue are they still living or just existing like zombies? In all Western nations it didn't matter if one took more stringent or more lenient actions, everyone had a first wave, everyone has a second wave. Nobody invented a testing regime, a track and trace regime which allows us to live normally, so what's the point in taking those measures when they didn't prevent a second wave for anyone?

> Colouring the rules themselves as "silly" only reveals a bias in your argument

Fair point. Young generations have been taught for many decades now that we are not in this world together. Nobody pays off your debt. Nobody else will look after your health if you don't do it yourself. Nobody will come and provide you shelter when you become homeless. Look at the most woke state in the USA - California - every woke person walks past homeless people and couldn't are less. People who claim we are in this or in anything else together are selfish afraid human beings who want to control the population out of their own fear. The notion that we are in this together is wrong and that is the education that young people have been given for many years now. This is how it was in the last economic crisis, this is how it will be in this one too. So as far as I'm concerned COVID was nothing to me and my wife and it is not a threat to our family, so why should we care any longer about this? Other people's problems is not our problem. Just like every woke Californian walks past homeless people and doesn't care, I walk past the COVID death statistics and equally don't care. Why am I the villain now?

Everyone with the 'I've got mine' mentality is the villain. I expect that reasoning from my 3 year old son, but my 5 yo daughter has already moved passed it. That an entire nation basis it's philosophy on that of a toddler is... Disturbing.

I appreciate that you elaborated on your opinion and I believe many of your points are valid. COVID is not a big threat to you and your family (based on my assumptions about you which could very well be wrong). Neither is it a big threat to me, 30 year old, healthy, single male living in Germany.

However, some of your assertions are not true. The COVID waves were vastly different in different countries across Europe, and despite Germany having elevated cases again and a second "Lockdown" the situation is nowhere near what it was in May. No constant Sirens from Ambulances (where I live), no overcrowded ICUs (some exceptions). Similarly, the lockdown proposed now is more lenient than a couple of months ago.

There is a definite talking point to be made about which rules are more effective than others and I personally would be more lenient than what my government proposes, but all in all we fared fairly well in comparison with our neighboring countries.

One point you made about a generation only caring about itself I can falsify immediately: The only reason why I am missing a basketball game with friends tonight is because I had an encounter with a positive covid case (my cousin). While I'm >99% sure I'm COVID free, I opted to argue on the internet tonight as some of my basketball peers are in a risk group (>60).

You're not the villain. I don't know you.

> Young generations have been taught for many decades now that we are not in this world together. Nobody pays off your debt. Nobody else will look after your health if you don't do it yourself. Nobody will come and provide you shelter when you become homeless

You picked some extreme examples. We are in this world together. It's called a society. It's unfair, it's cruel, it's skewed, but to imply everybody is completely on their own is disillusioned. Humans cooperate. Not always willingly, but effectively. This is how we prospered for millennia and occupied every corner of the globe. You're sharing your thoughts now thanks to cooperative work by countless people who built the information age.

Thinking you can lift yourself up from your bootstraps and only think for yourself is ignoring how interconnected the society where you live is.

Pointing out extreme cases where people put a limit to their compassion doesn't change the fact that you do owe your successes in your life also to the effort of others you have never met.

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