Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

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> As for corona, it's more or less common knowledge by now that unless you're 60+ a common cold is more dangerous.

That's a lie. The reality is that Covid-19 is massively more fatal than the ordinary flu [1]:

> We take the comparison between Covid-19 and flu seriously by asking how many years of influenza and pneumonia deaths are needed for cumulative deaths to those two causes to equal the cumulative toll of the Covid-19 pandemic between March 2020 and February 2023—that is, three years of pandemic deaths. We find that in one state alone—Hawaii—three years of Covid-19 mortality is equivalent to influenza and pneumonia mortality in the three years preceding the Covid-19 pandemic. For all other states, at least nine years of flu and pneumonia are needed to match Covid-19; for the United States as a whole, seventeen years are needed; and for four states, more than 21 years (the maximum observable) are needed.

The reduction in CFR since 2022-ish can mostly be attributed to vaccines [2], but unfortunately it turns out that said vaccine protection only lasts for about 6 months - that is why we are seeing COVID "summer waves" [3] which hasn't been a thing for influenza... people get vaccinated in autumn and winter, which lessens the impact of Covid during the winter time, but once that partial immunity expires cases go up again.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10168500/

[2] https://www.rsm.ac.uk/media-releases/2023/risk-of-death-redu...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/nx-s1-5453516/summer-surge-in...

None of those links actually cite the mortality rate of covid vs the flu

The first one is sufficient to counter the completely unsubstantiated claim of the common cold/influenza being more dangerous than Covid, but I do agree that handing out exact numbers would have been better.

It isn't remotely sufficient. It cherry picks the first few years of COVID. Of course more people died because it's a novel virus. If you somehow genetically engineered an exact clone of the flu virus in every way except with it was completely novel to the immune system and released it, of course way more people would die of it in the first year.

> It cherry picks the first few years of COVID.

The original post this thread is about literally referred to these early years:

> 2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments

Claiming in this context that the common cold is more harmful is a lie, no matter what.

Yeah, the common cold statement is just wrong. Also COVID is actually more deadly than the flu by about 3x from what I have read when it adjusts for all the relevant factors. The problem I have with the whole thing is that the media and government whipped everyone up into a panic over it. If you said to people, "there's a virus 3x as bad as the flu, what should we do?" I thik very few would say "lockdown everything non-essential."

So? Few people think things through systematically. Most countries would have desperately struggled to accommodate the increased demand on ICUs and skilled staff care. In fact, despite lockdowns and the provision of Nightingale facilities in the UK, the NHS was often overwhelmed as infections periodically peaked. We're still suffering the ongoing effects of urgent care that could not be provided in a timely fashion as resources got diverted due to Covid. See e.g. https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj-2023-075613

I shudder to think what would happen if we hadn't locked down.

> That's a lie.

None of your links address the OP's claim. You'd need to consider < 60 mortality, not total. Replies like yours are not trust-building.

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