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Comment by wellthatsawrap1 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that's the entire point of excess deaths. Cause of death doesn't matter; "a whole bunch more people died than is normal" gives us useful info.

If you look at the chart at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm, you'll see a spike of excess deaths from the nasty 2017-2018 flu season on the far-left side, and you'll see the impact of the pandemic very clearly in the right-hand side.

It does, but note that flu was _far_ lower than usual during at least some periods during this.

We practically wiped out the flu via social distancing and people still kept dying from Covid. Nasty virus.

Yeah. If anything, that showed me that we should have been trying harder to prevent the flu from killing so many people, since it's obviously possible to have a large effect on.

(Which is not to say that we shouldn't be working on covid too of course)

All the figures include flu deaths. Including the pre Covid figures.

It’s excess deaths. If you don’t know what that means, Google is your friend.

It's also important to note that all the emergency public health measures put in place to curtail covid infections also contributed to lower the spread of the flu, thus it's expected that the number of flu cases behind excess deaths is significantly lower than the baseline.

Very true. There's a lot of factors to consider, including the effect of decreased access to healthcare due to overloaded hospitals.

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