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Comment by wearywanderer | Hacker News Reader

I find that very hard to believe. Who can honestly say they were never wrecked by a bad flu and coughed up a lung for a week or two? Certainly I have been, and everybody in my family has been, and I've certainly seen friends and coworkers sick as hell before too. Most people know what it feels like to be very ill.

If anything, the fevers, coughs and congestion caused by covid 19 are fairly mild, even though covid is quite lethal. That's why you have people who are dying of covid but think they aren't very sick, or even think the virus isn't real at all.

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Colds are pretty common, influenza not that much. In my 39 years of age I typically catch a cold almost every year, but the flu only once in my entire life.

Influenza is rare? Maybe rare for you if you habitually get the flu shot twice a year, but even then the efficacy of the flu shot can be as low as 50%. Influenza is very common, most people have experienced it.

This is correct.

Adults catch real flu about once every five years, scientists calculate, based on a field study in China.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31698038

on average, about 8% of the U.S. population gets sick from flu each season, with a range of between 3% and 11%, depending on the season.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm

Flu is kinda like COVID: a significant percentage of infections are without symptoms.

Lots of estimates, I usually see it as around one-third of cases having no symptoms: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2646474/

I’ll take a slight leap and guesstimate this means a lot of flu infections are around the symptom level of a mild or bad cold as well.

When you know you have the flu, it’s probably the flu, but it’s much harder to self-determine that you don’t have the flu.

I read once that many cases of the flu are really food poisoning. I got H1N1 and felt like I was dying for a week. Looking back I now think it's the only time I've ever really had the flu.

Adults catch real flu about once every five years, scientists calculate, based on a field study in China.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31698038

The CDC estimates around 30 million symptomatic influenza infections in a year; in recent years, more[1].

And roughly three-quarter of infections are asymptomatic[2], so ~120 million total cases annually.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221326001...

Correct. I'm 36 and unless it was mild or asymptomatic, I'm sure I've never had influenza.

When people exaggerate a common cold into "the flu" I respond with equal exaggeration by insisting I take them to the hospital.

Influenza can be mild, even asymptomatic, so unless you are really able to test; you probably don't have good numbers for how often you've caught the flu.

> That's why you have people who are dying of covid but think they aren't very sick, or even think the virus isn't real at all.

Yeah, this is 100 percent not the reason people think covid isn’t real.

There are a myriad of reasons why people think covid isn't real. But for the segment of that population who think it isn't real when they are dying of it, the perceived severity of their experienced symptoms is a big part of it.

It took 31 years before I ever caught the real flu (influenza), and not just a cold or stomach flu. And most people in my family or my friends have never had it.

Your friends and family might never have had serious influenza symptoms. But asymptomatic infections are very common so it's likely that some of them have at least been infected.

I can believe that, could be for me as well I guess, maybe that was just my first time having strong symptoms.

Im in my late 30s and I have never had the flu. Ive had multiple terrible colds, but no flu.

The flus not hard to avoid, and might have gone extinct with the lockdowns

EDIT: i dont take the flu vaccine

> [Influenza] might have gone extinct with the lockdowns

I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Ive had multiple terrible colds, but no flu.

How do you tell the difference between a terrible cold and flu? Doctors can't tell the difference from symptoms alone, do you have yourself tested each time you have a cold?

might have gone extinct with the lockdowns

That's not likely, and with fewer people exposed to the flu and gaining natural immunity, there may even be a big spike in flu cases if social distancing and mask wearing are relaxed next flu season.

I guess that's a good point, but I think of the flu as different symptoms, you are really fatigued, you have brain fog, feel a bit like you are at the brink of death, have headaches, and you're caughing, maybe with a sore throat and more difficulty breathing.

Whereas colds are more congestion with drowsiness.

But you're totally right, symptoms alone are hard to use for accurately knowing what you had, there are so many types of cold virus and bacteria out there too.

I guess for me, I had never had the symptoms I describe in the former, until a few years ago I did, which I thought of as getting the flu. Had it been early 2020, I might have wondered if it was Covid, given the description of symptoms.

> might have gone extinct with the lockdowns

This is unlikely as humans aren’t the only hosts for influenza. Almost all can infect birds and most can infect pigs. Probably some other humans too. And jump between eachother and humans.

We might have the same issue with COVID: vaccinating all humans may not eradicate it if some animals serve as natural reservoirs (mink maybe? Ferrets?).

Perhaps horseshoe bats and/or pangolins may be animal reservoirs as well.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

While you can’t perfectly reliably, a fever is a pretty good indicator; anything beyond a mild fever is very unusual for the cold, but standard for flu.

A high fever.

The difference is quite significant and a doctor should know the difference.

I was 40 the first (and only) time I caught flu. I went to the doctor. I don't go to the doctor for a bad cold.

Maybe there are light flus. I don't know - but I don't want the real thing again.

while high fever and other symptoms is a rule of thumb, there's still enough overlap between flu and cold symptoms (especially a mild flu vs a bad cold) that your doctor is not going to tell you you have one or the other without doing a flu test.

With Flu your bones or muscles ache or your belly feels like it falls off. When bad, you have all symptoms. Worse is when attracting lung inflammation, that feels as if you are constantly drowning. All of this with high fever or even worse, cold fever.

Those symptoms may or may not occur depending on the influenza strain and the individual patient. Many influenza cases are entirely asymptomatic.

Flus and colds have significant differences.

If you develop symptoms abruptly and you have a fever and/or body aches it's almost certainly the flu.

Unfortunately, flu has animal reservoirs; it’s going nowhere permanently.

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