Quote:
Originally Posted by petegz28
Uh okay, so are you estimating the number if people who had the flu and basing the death rate on that but not estimating the number of people who have Covid but instead using the hard numbers and basing the death rate on that?
That seems like what you are saying and seems like it is not a fair comparison.
|
The CDC projects an average number of deaths for the flu every year. You can find the info on the number of people who they believe died of the flu right here:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
There is a reported number and a 95% confidence interval for each group. The listed number for each group that I gave Marcellus is pulled directly from that link.
That link also contains an estimated number of symptomatic infections (asymptomatic infections would decrease the IFR of the flu, but again, I did not include them)
Meanwhile, the CDC is also listing deaths from COVID on the site you linked. Note that I pulled deaths f
rom the COVID side only and not from COVID+pneumonia, which would purposefully depress the numbers.
Antibody studies in the US have put prevalence at no more than 5%. Five percent of 330,000,000 is 16 million.
So, disease A has 16 million total infections and 13,000+ deaths in one cohort. Disease B has 35 million symptomatic infections and 8,000 deaths in the same cohort.
Even when I make every piece of data look artificially low for COVID, the death rate is still multiple times higher than the flu for people under 65.