Holy shit that’s basically mass murder.
(Not comparing the two diseases, but wondering where grim Covid attitudes will persist)
Counted like COVID19 there are only about 15 000 who die from Seasonal Flu in the US. Compare that to the 250 000 or so dead despite massive efforts to contain COVID19.
For a start, Covid-19 testing is much more widespread than flu testing. The UK has been testing everyone hospitalized for any reason for Covid, which they don't do for flu, and I think other Western countries are broadly similar. The flu tests are also less sensitive. Not only that, but because flu tends to kill more via secondary bacterial pneumonia, apparently patients don't necessarily have enough influenza virus left to test positive by the time they're hospitalized, whereas Covid causes pneumonia directly. Also, there's strong statistical evidence that flu causes heart attacks which aren't recorded as influenza deaths on things like death certificates.
The headline CDC, etc stats take all this into account to estimate the number of people who died as a result of flu, in the sense that they'd have lived if they weren't infected. The "counted like Covid-19" stats generally don't count these as flu deaths, whilst comparing with stats that count almost anyone who died after being infected with Covid-19 as a Covid-19 death regardless of whether it was directly caused by Covid in this sense. They really don't compare like with like.
Yes, the same regime that notoriously made the UK a sick joke around the world after openly announcing its preferred strategy of infecting as much of the population as possible with a deadly plague.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-for-soci...
Trying to protect waiters/esses jobs, maybe?
Though pjc50’s comment looks pretty convincing given gov.uk could have used the same money to make it easier for businesses to restructure to offer delivery...