[O.city]

Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins

That the devil is in the details.

Here's the important difference: hospitalization rates are different than hospitalizations per illness. You have to remember that the seasonal flu affects somewhere around 40 million sympomatic carriers in a bad year (total numbers of infection would be higher). If the antibody studies are to be believed, then even the state with the highest rate of infection in the country would only extrapolate to about 40 million total infections. The reality is that it's probably somewhere around 20 million at most (that would correlate with around 6% infection rate).

It's also worth noting that standards for hospitalizations have changed. They are only admitting relatively serious COVID cases due to fear of spread and lack of equipment and PPE. Hospitals survive in part on soft admits, and I have no doubt that were the same principles applied to COVID as flu you'd have substantially more hospitalizations for the latter than currently exist.

Also, here is other data from the site:

The overall cumulative COVID-19 associated hospitalization rate is 40.4 per 100,000, with the highest rates in people 65 years and older (131.6 per 100,000) and 50-64 years (63.7 per 100,000).

Hospitalization rates for COVID-19 in adults (18-64 years) are higher than hospitalization rates for influenza at comparable time points* during the past 5 influenza seasons.

For people 65 years and older, current COVID-19 hospitalization rates are similar to those observed during comparable time points* during recent high severity influenza seasons.

For children (0-17 years), COVID-19 hospitalization rates are much lower than influenza hospitalization rates during recent influenza seasons.

-------

Here's the other issue: the CDC extrapolated their case load for flu based on symptomatic illness, but the flu also has asymptomatic carriers. It doesn't make their data wrong, but the way we process it can be affected by how we see COVID cases. When we factor COVID hospitalizations and overall disease burden in we bake the asymptomatic carriers into the cake, but we don't do that when discussing the flu. Thus, if you were to put the asymptomatic carriers in with the flu the rates of hospitalization would drop by a fair amount (16% by one meta-analysis but it had an extremely high rate of heterogeneity).

The other thing to remember is that even the worst flu season of the last decade only saw 60,000 deaths. We're well above that now with mitigation efforts, the background death rate strongly suggests that it's undercounted even then, and the number of cumulative infections is without a doubt still quite a bit below where a normal flu season would be.

Fewer infections, more deaths = deadlier virus
Similar hospitalizations = equally deadly virus or difference in admit practices

Did the CDC just revise the Covid death number down as well or am I reading that wrong?