I'm confused by the downvotes on this. The comment is quoting CDC numbers, this is not some fake news report.
The 0.4% mortality for coronavirus is the CDC best estimate.
The 0.2% is from the CDC website for the 2017 flu season.
Edit: The parent comment has apparently been flag removed. But it was claiming that the reaction to coronavirus (lockdown) is worse than the damage from the virus, and used the above comparison to flu mortality to support this claim.
I'm not sure why this comment was flag removed, since it used data to support a position.
Nearly 100,000 people have died of COVID19 and there’s good evidence that this is a substantial undercount. All this in a context where we shut down transmission vectors (being indoors, with lots of people). Most estimates I’ve seen suggest we’ll hit 150k-200k deaths by end of year. 2017-2018 flu season killed about 80,000 with no mitigation efforts. Just on the face of it, this virus is far more than 2x deadlier than the flu.
Sure, but 2x deadlier than the flu just means 2 flu seasons. It's not great, but we don't do half-lockdowns fur 1 flu season. Why do a full lockdown for the equivalent of two flu seasons?
What would the numbers look like without mitigations? There are certainly some flu seasons that are 2x worse than average. I imagine that the cutoff between no action and hard mitigation would be a 10x flu event. It seems plausible to me that this would have been 10x the flu with business as usual.
That still doesn’t do accounting for the negative effects of mitigation. The truth is that this is an open-ended ethical question and it’s not fun to participate in.
If you compare Sweden to the other Scandinavian countries (which is the most suitable comparison considering population distribution and habits) the light measures actually seem to have resulted in a much higher prevalence.
Yes, but not catastrophic prevalence. The question was whether not locking down things like schools would result in much higher deaths than we currently see in for example England or New York. The answer is no, not necessarily.
In Sweden a lot of people were self-isolating and being cautious without the need of a formal lockdown. They still have the most deaths per capita in Europe.
Schools were open. A million kids went to crowded classrooms every day for the past two months and death rate is still not even close to England, Belgium, Italy or New York.
The number of deaths per capita is higher than England, Belgium, and Italy however the total number is lower (they have a smaller population). They also have a low population density, a lot of single households, and as a population have less issues with diabetes, obesity, and chronic heart conditions compared to other countries.
Targeted lockdown was a good idea in the context (not that much different clusters).
Sweden was since the beginning at the place where France will be next week, but Sweden did not have the Mulhouse cluster that crippled multiple hospitals in eastern France.
Many thanks to Switzerland and Germany for helping us saving a dozen patients by the way.
If you compare Sweden to other countries with full and absolute total lockdowns like Belgium the UK and Spain and Italy....they actually have lower incidences of infections fatalities and higher incidences of recoveries.
Sweden is the control group in all of this for how effective lockdowns are and it's showing that they're potentially not as effective as we think they are.
Sweden has a higher density of day to day human interactions than any country with full quarantine lock down.
How do the other data points apply to a country that's been on quarantine for months and another that has never been on quarantine?
The exponential explosion of coronavirus cases hasn't happened in Sweden and it's not happening so far when people reopen their economies. there's not even a second wave in economies that have been reopened since early May like Florida.
The model was flawed.
Time to face facts quarantine was ineffective response.
The major flaw in your argument is focusing on an official quarantine order. In practice it seems many of the places you mention have an informal quarantine in place. In Florida Miami-Dade county did have a lockdown though the broader state didn’t. It’s also the densest, so most at risk. Nursing homes also took steps way beyond the government order and well before the order. There’s also tons of evidence that people did not adopt initially and are not returning to normal behavior. For example even in Sweden restaurant attendance was down massively even in the absence of an official ban.
You may be right that a more localized or targeted response has almost the same effect as a full lockdown. (Though things are still decidedly not great in Sweden concerning the death rate). But people are taking massive measures even in non-locked down areas, it’s improper to compare that to the status quo ante.
If there wasn't a lock down in Florida like you say and no hospitals were overwhelmed and no exponential explosion of cases happened.... Then that's all the evidence you need to know that flattening the curve was a myth and quarantine was an ineffective solution.
(the same effect happened in Sweden by the way)
I bet you based on these data points that every region that opens it's economy will have the same result. Steady state of cases, no second wave.
Quarantine was pointless. A lot of lives were ruined by the flat curve proponents...for nothing.
That’s actually not what I said. I’m saying there were lockdowns in the most important regions (Miami-Dade for example), that people behaved as though there were lockdowns in at risk areas (nursing homes), and that people are still behaving with lockdown-style precautions. All of these things produced a flatter curve, and have also to a certain extent done so in Sweden where people followed many (not all) lockdown precautions without official government decree.
Just because the government didn’t say things were locked down doesn’t mean they weren’t in practice. Look at Sweden’s GDP losses, restaurant attendance, movie attendance, you’ll find they haven’t avoided massive economic damage. In exchange they also have a pretty high death rate.
These things are complicated, but it’s pretty clear lockdown behavior cuts infection spread. It’s also pretty clear people are terrified of getting sick, so they’ll adopt the behavior to a certain degree regardless of decree. This means issuing a decree or not doesn’t make you avoid economic pain, but a decree might make it easier to guide the right actions and give pretext to minimize economic pain via external support.
People are finding it impossible to discuss this rationally. If you try to disagree with the seriousness of this and even insinuate that the response is incorrect you are demonized even if you back it up with data.
The data from Sweden and regions opening up their economies are starting to show that there are is no exponential explosion of coronavirus cases like predicted, no hospitals are being overwhelmed.
The data is starting to show and will continue to show as time marches... that quarantine was potentially ineffective, the fatality rate was extremely inflated, and flattening the curve was potentially a mistaken theory.
> there’s good evidence that this is a substantial undercount.
I don’t know about the US, but most European countries count anyone who died with corona as a covid death. No matter how clearly you died to something else.
The overall flu mortality estimation counts people we guess might have flu, but never seeked doctor. As deaths, they estimate how may other deaths are fly and add them (like % of pneumonia). There is also fuzziness about who counts as death from flu too. For covid, there is no added estimation afaik, if you die without test you dont count.
It is not like one number was super clean and other dirty. Both are dirty and estimations.
While that may be true, most European countries still undercount the true death rates since there are large discrepancies between each country's official covid deaths and excess deaths.
Yes, but it's not quite the same, because the suicides etc for COVID-19 are not directly caused by the virus, but by our reaction to it, and some believe it's an over-reaction.
I'm not an expert on the actual, real dangers, e.g. how many and who will die, so that's not what I'm concerned with. If they're terribly high, doing what ever is necessary to stop it is right, I consider that obvious. "Flattening the curve" makes generally sense to me, in a "let's make sure our hospital system doesn't collapse" kind of way.
I live in a county of a bit over 300.000 people in Germany. We have 10 known active cases in the county. We're still in a very constrained soft-lock-down, i.e. schools not running normally, half the offices not open, mandatory masks, public services on emergency-only-level etc. We're still taking damage economically, obviously. Lots of people are scared to death in a very real way, and are still afraid to leave their houses.
Is it still the right call to remain in this state today? Will it be when we have 0 active cases, but there are counties nearby that still have more than 0? By saying "well, everything that happens happens because of COVID-19", we're removing our agency from the equation.
Where do you see the data that 80% of people are asymptomatic? You complain elsewhere in this thread of being dismissed even when you have data, yet provide none.
We understand that you think that the lockdowns are bunk and that this is a big non-issue cooked up by the world to ruin our lives; sure, maybe, but where is the data?
"We understand that you think that the lockdowns are bunk "
Correction...lockdowns ARE bunk.
WHERES THE SECOND WAVE?
Why hasn't Sweden followed the model of exponential explosion that was used to justify the lockdowns.
The flat curver movement was unscientific and wrong and you would do well to fight unscientific attacks on your civil freedoms with all of your vigour going forward because this isn't the last time this will be attempted.
Thank you for posting the data. These are both brand new from yesterday, however, so I’m not sure why the tone here is so belligerent. Either way, this is incredibly interesting, and something we should continue to look into going forward. It sure would be nice to ease up on the lockdowns if they are not the correct path going forward.
If you do some research and start questioning the narrative the amount of demonization and arrogant dismissiveness you get for it will make you belligerent. lol
People are scared and when you disagree with the experts even if you're right you get treated poorly.
It seems pretty clear that the systemic effects of COVID-19 are much worse than those of seasonal flu. You don't see news of hospitals struggling to cope with seasonal flu the way we've seen now. You don't have Italian doctors triaging patients with the flu.
Don't actually see places struggling with this and coronavirus ... most of the overflow hospitals were empty.
In places that have largely opened their economies back up we're not seeing any overwhelming of hospitals.
We're also not seeing this in Sweden who never locked down.
Flatening the curve could have been a myth, an incorrect response. There's no evidence showing that it was effective compared to control groups like Sweden and regions with reopened economies.
I do think the CDC numbers seem strange - when I search for "flu IFR" and "coronavirus IFR" what I find for flu is 0.04-0.2% and for coronavirus it's more like 0.4-1%. So these CDC best estimates seem to make the comparison more favorable than the numbers found in other places. It seems like a factor 6 or so difference is realistic, which makes it quite a bit more serious than the flu.
One thing that worries me more about coronavirus than the flu is that it can cause lasting lung damage. I personally think that the higher mortality and the possibility of permanent damage in people who survive justify restrictions, but I guess that's a matter of opinion.
Sidebar, but I simply cannot figure out how the CDC estimates flu mortality.
I've spent about an hour trying to find the info, and gave up. I was able to figure out how they estimate flu deaths: they take the officially diagnosed deaths, and the multiply it by a factor based on presumed deaths. For example, they assume some % of pneumonia deaths are cause by the flu.
But I simply cannot figure out how they estimate the number of flu infections per year, which is the other half of IFR. It obviously is a statistical model (they don't do millions of flu tests a year), but what is the model? Without this info, it's really not an apples-to-apples comparison when you take flu IFR and compare it to coronavirus IFR.
No! I dug through that page and the cited papers, and it absolutely does not have any of the answers to those questions.
If you find the answers on that page, I'd love to read them.
For example, they say:
> The numbers of influenza illnesses were estimated from hospitalizations based on how many illnesses there are for every hospitalization, which was measured previously (5).
Ok... "estimated from hospitalizations"? What does that mean? How are you deriving that estimate? If you read the study linked, they say this:
> Multipliers were calculated as the simple inverses of the proportions at each step. We accounted for variability and uncertainty in model parameters by using a probabilistic (Monte Carlo) approach
Ok... so it's a Monte Carlo simulation? What does that even mean in this context?
Compare this to the Coronavirus IFR estimates. They are easy to understand. They test random samples of people in a population for antibodies, and use that to estimate the spread of the virus.
I looked at the linked study. It's not very complicated. In fact one could argue their method was too simple.
They estimated the number of illnesses by dividing the number of hospitalizations by a series of probabilities (the probabilities constitute a funnel from someone getting an infection to someone being hospitalized - for example the probability you actually seek hospital attention, the probability your test accurately detects influenza, etc). The probabilities were uniformly sampled from a range of plausible values (derived from their survey data). They did this process 10k times to arrive at an distribution over the number of illnesses (this is a Monte Carlo simulation).
> One thing that worries me more about coronavirus than the flu is that it can cause lasting lung damage.
Flu can also cause lasting lung damage. All diseases inducing pneumonia can do that. I have seen no evidence that these things are more prevalent in corona than in influenza. The reason we see so many articles about the rare effects in corona and not the flu is that corona is a hot topic and news is drumming up scare stories about it for clicks.
I agree there is no clear evidence on the prevalence in coronavirus vs flu but I think as a naive estimate it's reasonable to suspect that if it's around 6x more deadly, that serious side effects are similarly more prevalent. Considering we don't know the disease very well it seems better to err on the side of caution.
It's comparing 0.4% and 0.2% but not mentioning infectiousness (covid-19 appears more transmissible). 0.4% of a very large number will be considerably more people than 0.2% of a much smaller number.
It says we do precisely nothing for flu and that's incorrect. We have internationally coordinated programmes of vaccine development and we have annual programmes to vaccinate as many vulnerable people and healthcare workers as possible. We have programmes of flu monitoring and surveillance that tell us what strains of flu are circulating, who is being affected by it, and whether we need to create more surge capacity.
Notice that flu always puts pressure on healthcare systems -- hospitals get fuller, and they often try not to book as many elective surgeries during winter -- but they're not, even in bad flu seasons, overwhelmed. We don't have temporary morgues set up in container lorries in car parks. Funeral homes don't get overwhelmed.
> The scenarios are intended to advance public health preparedness and planning. They are not predictions or estimates of the expected impact of COVID-19.
People made the issue political in USA. So instead of thinking rationally and discussing facts people just vote along the party lines. Downplaying the disease makes them think that you are right wing and hence should be down-voted.
That percentage represents a million people in the US. It also doesn't represent the number of people who may experience shortened lifespans due to damage to their lungs or other organs.
Also, the comment suggests that we do nothing for the flu, which is patently false. We organize massive vaccination efforts every year to combat the flu, we have readily available tests, and we have a well understood model for how it spreads and how to treat it (including antivirals if caught early.)
Comparing it to the flu seems to be arguing in bad faith along political lines rather than deeply examining the issue.
> Comparing it to the flu seems to be arguing in bad faith along political lines rather than deeply examining the issue.
No it isn't. Before vaccine a normal flu season killed 0.1% of the population in a year. Not 0.1% of infected, 0.1% of everyone. Those kinds of numbers are not good, but they are not a catastrophe either, especially if it is just a single year. And to me it looks like Corona is roughly that dangerous, meaning it is like an Influenza we don't have a vaccine against. We should work hard to create a vaccine for this disease, just like we did for influenza, but I haven't seen anyone who did the math on if it is worth locking things down to prevent loss of life. People in the early 1900's didn't think it was worth it, and when I do the math with current mortality in Sweden which barely locked down then the numbers clearly show that a lockdown wasn't worth it.
Doing the math is an input but it isn’t the solution itself. The question of what to do is a policy decision which doesn’t have an objective right answer.
The moral thing to do is to ask whether someone in their 20's would choose to lock down for a few months in order to slightly reduce the risk of dying in their 80's. I think we all know the answer to that. It is only a dilemma of the person would choose to do it for themselves but not others, the current measures would not be done by almost anyone for themselves.
The 0.4% mortality for coronavirus is the CDC best estimate.
The 0.2% is from the CDC website for the 2017 flu season.
Edit: The parent comment has apparently been flag removed. But it was claiming that the reaction to coronavirus (lockdown) is worse than the damage from the virus, and used the above comparison to flu mortality to support this claim.
I'm not sure why this comment was flag removed, since it used data to support a position.