Remember November 2018?

[LilacTree1]

No, neither do I.

Well, I remember the story but I think I only heard it once because dad was still alive and working for the NHS.

www.independent.co.uk/news/health/flu-vaccine-deaths-nhs-ineffective-crisis-bad-weather-illness-2017-a8660496.html

See here. ’Those that tested positive for coronavirus...”

No you fool, you haven't discovered some dark German secret that the British government haven't noticed.

How rude - I haven't suggested that at all.

It quite clearly says the word estimate 3 times in my link.

I meant to say my post.

Thank you Millicent

That’s good to know.

@LilacTree1

2018 was indeed a very bad year for the flu, with 50,000 excess deaths... Last week we had 12,000 excess deaths in a single week and that was with a lockdown. If we had gone through this as a society as we went through the 2018 flu outbreak (ie 99% do nothing different), we’d quite possibly be at 500,000 deaths!

Of all the countries in Europe, only Belgium seems to include a death as COVID if it is just suspected;

all other countries, including the UK, only include those with a positive COVID test either before or after death

These Financial Times graphs of deaths from all causes in UK regions show
a sharp jump in excess deaths for 2020 - RED curves - during the COVID epidemic

that is NOT seen in previous years - GREY curves - for this period:

Boris said again in his broadcast today that if the UK hadn't had lockdown,
then deaths from COVID could have been up to 500,000

Governments around the world - left, right, centre, theocracies - have instigated lockdowns.
They aren't all part of some sinister Global Lizard conspiracy to destroy the economy for lizard shits and giggles

No, we never needed to lock down for flu but we locked down for COVID because:

• COVID has a higher death rate than flu
• COVID is more infectious than flu
• People with COVID are infectious for days before they have symptoms - so they don't know they are spreading it
• We have no vaccine for COVID, unlike flu where scientists prepare vaccines in advance of the flu season.
• We don't yet have effective anti-virals to treat very sick people who have COVID
• Doctors & scientists have had to learn from scratch how to deal with COVID - because it is a "novel" Coronavirus

Forget the nuanced debate - the implication of the OP is that because the number of flu deaths in 2017-2018) that was when the report came out) is more than the number of deaths due to Covid at the present time, then we should not have bothered with all the precautions (chiefly lockdown) which have kept the Covid deaths to the total we CURRENTLY have, just because OP doesn’t believe in lockdown.

Justin Wolfers@JustinWolfers

Remembering that very responsible
@wsj oped (https://wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464…) arguing against lockdowns because

"only 0.01% of those who got the virus would die." 🤔

We now know that 0.23% of all New Yorkers have died from it
(That’s a share of all NYers, not just those with the virus.)

< Antibody tests on NYC found 21% had been infected ... to kill that % of the entire population within just a few weeks >

@LilacTree1

Same flu season in America. Hospitals were known as “war zones”. No lockdowns!

California hospitals face a ‘war zone’ of flu patients — and are setting up tents to treat them

www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-flu-demand-20180116-htmlstory.html

The huge numbers of sick people are also straining hospital staff who are confronting what could become California’s worst flu season in a decade.

Hospitals across the state are sending away ambulances, flying in nurses from out of state and not letting children visit their loved ones for fear they’ll spread the flu. Others are canceling surgeries and erecting tents in their parking lots so they can triage the hordes of flu patients.

“Those are all creative things we wouldn’t typically do, but in a crisis like this, we’re looking at,” said Michelle Gunnett, a nurse who oversees emergency services for a Southern California hospital system.

It is of interest and important to consider previous flu outbreaks...it seems covid might be with us a long time and might also have a vaccine..it may join the other respiratory viruses for years to come it seems.

I suppose vaccines would be the same as in the elderly would not be as immune as well. I know it is worrying to think about but it seems it is here to stay..

www.sciencefocus.com/news/coronavirus-will-covid-19-become-a-seasonal-virus/

On a personal level, my Granny died of pneumonia after flu, and also my child was very ill from pneumonia as a toddler after a viral infection so yes the severity is something I am familiar with as well.

@BigChocFrenzy

Since you’re so keen on the highly inaccurate Imperial Model...

First Analysis:
lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

Follow-up Analysis:
lockdownsceptics.org/second-analysis-of-fergusons-model/

I have also had experience of my dad who is in his 70s now being sent home quite early from hospital due to flu cases as they didn't want him to catch it, as well, it is taken seriously in hospitals with regard the elderly.

Interesting info from the British lung foundation here on pneumonia / past outbreaks of flu and population etc. I notice there is not the same 70%/30% male to female case ratio there is with covid.. but there is a link with deprivation / poverty

statistics.blf.org.uk/pneumonia

In 2012, of the 28,952 deaths from pneumonia:

58 were among those aged 0–14 years of age;
1,374 were among those aged 15–64; and
27,520 were among those aged 65 and above.

58 children- quite a lot

It does annoy me a bit when people don't take other viruses than covid seriously. I still remember the death of my Granny and DS on oxygen fighting pneumonia and feel people sometimes don't realise how serious it is.

As proven by the PP upthread.

@Mumlove5

Irrespective of the Imperial model’s flaws (and tell me a Covid model in March that didn’t!), it appears to be fairly consistent with the position a couple of month’s later. Of course, we can hardly go back in time and change public policy to see how it would have panned out, but we can see that where the infection was able to spread more extensively than it was in the UK, the numbers aren’t dissimilar. NYC deaths are at 0.23%... and that’s with a lockdown helping to prevent it from escalating further. Scale that up to the UK and you have 150,000 deaths. Without lockdown in NYC, you’d likely be looking at a far higher number still. Of course NYC isn’t identical to the UK, but apart from the fact that it’s density enabled a faster spread (which is why it got so bad) than elsewhere, there’s no reason to think the UK, wouldn’t have had similar figures, albeit over a slightly longer period (though Bergamo shows that even in small towns, it doesn’t make that much difference!)

@Mumlove5

“Same flu season in America. Hospitals were known as “war zones”. No lockdowns!”

Ironically you’ve helped make the argument for a lockdown! If hospitals were war zones “even” with the flu, then surely with Covid they’d have been completely overwhelmed, as we saw in Bergamo (which then locked down to avoid making it even worse still!)... Try asking a NYC medic how the 2018 flu season compared with Covid? In interviews no one says “yes, it’s awful, but actually it’s not that much worse than the 2018 flu.... and yes, we’d have coped ok if we hadn’t locked down.”

I didn't remember but my mother reminded me a few weeks ago that an operation she needed was delayed just before she went into surgery because the orthopaedic ward was full of flu patients. Eventually she had the op about 5 months later.

As for dying of pneumonia a friend of my mothers died yesterday of pneumonia, definitely not covid-related.

And flu IS a serious disease. Just before lockdown I listened to the RKI in Germany talking about it and the scientist said that no, covid isn't flu, but people shouldn't dismiss flu because it's a serious illness. The problem is that people equate colds with flu and think flu isn't serious, when it is.

To put this into perspective, the CDC estimates that 79,400 people died of flu in 2017-18 out of a population of 330 million. It was a particularly bad year and as @Mumlove5 reported, hospitals were like war zone. There was no lockdown so flu permeated through the USA and found a natural equilibrium when presumably a mixture of herd immunity and weather conditions caused that season’s to die back. The CDC estimates that 48 million were sick. With asymptomatic flu infections being around 3 out of 4, that’s 200 million infections (which would be around what’s expected for herd immunity, coupled with the vaccine performing particularly badly that year).

Take Covid-19. In NYC - the place in the USA where it’s got most out of control - 19,900 people have died (as of today... it’s still rising) out of a 8.4m population. That’s a mortality rate 10 times greater than the 2017-18 flu and that’s WITH a lockdown!

There may be arguments against lockdown, but the one presented here is ludicrous!

I don't think we are trying to argue against lockdown at all. More trying to emphasise the severity of other viruses such as influenza

In fact maybe this renewed awareness of viral diseases might even decrease the spread of flu as well as covid (via hand washing, social distancing etc) and the uptake of vaccines...might even hopefully prevent a big spike of flu at the same time of covid in the Autumn, (the worst case scenario everyone would be keen to avoid I'm sure)

@Orangeblossom78

I agree flu is dangerous and not to be underestimated - it kills thousands each year, but @Mumlove5 has consistently decried the lockdown as an unnecessary over-reaction. I believe @LilacTree1is in the same boat, which was the motivation for the thread.

OK. I'm not sure about that but know we are all cautious about these things and Lilac I know has also had pneumonia in the past.

I wish it was possible to discuss these issues without it always having to be about an 'agenda' many of us are not black / white for /against anything but somewhere in the middle!