Do on average 600 people die every year from seasonal flu?

[notevenat20]

There have been a lot of comparisons made between covid and seasonal flu so I am trying to get to the bottom of how many people actually die of seasonal flu every year. We know about 50,000 died on covid been march and august 2020.

Is this accurate?

"In the UK it is estimated that an average of 600 people a year die from complications of flu. In some years it is estimated that this can rise to over 10,000 deaths (see for example this UK study from 2013 , which estimated over 13,000 deaths resulting from flu in 2008-09). Flu leads to hundreds of thousands of GP visits and tens of thousands of hospital stays a year."

vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/vk/influenza-flu

If disagreeing please only cite official/academic references and not newspapers for example.

I would have thought it was more than 600 a year TBH.

Was the year with the high cases the year they didn't quite get the strains right in the vaccine and it was pretty ineffective?

The other thing is they often lump the stats together as 'flu and pneumonia' deaths - many pneumonia cases aren't after flu

I've known people die of pneumonia, I've not personally known anyone die of flu (also known people who died from covid) - thats not saying that some people won't die of flu, but so many people when they say flu is worse than covid are comparing covid deaths to flu and pneumonia deaths - not covid to flu (plenty of covid deaths will also have had pneumonia on the death certificate as covid caused the pneumonia)

no - on average 17000 per annum

if we continued at 1000 per day it would be 365000 deaths

The statistics seem to fluctuate too wildly. I read that last year over 12000 people in UK died of flu/flu related complications.

Right. That appears not to be what the ONS report.

Yup, there seems to be some jiggary pokery about the flu figures. Taking covid out of the picture, so say looking at 2017-2018 there is a gulf between say the actual ICU admissions for flu and flu deaths in hospital and the number calculated by an algorithm called Flomomo which guesses based on the excess mortality and taking into account the weather.

So, on the flu report on which it reports flu levels it says:

The FluMOMO model is an extension of the EuroMOMO algorithm which aims to
estimate the excess number of deaths associated with influenza activity, adjusting for
extreme temperature16
. Similar to the EuroMOMO model, it is a standardised model
which can be applied across countries and has been used previously in England to
estimate such deaths.

Someone more knowledgeable than me could be clear about the levels of confidence of those figures and all the variables but it's clear that it's not as simple as adding up all the flu entries on death certificates.

@FourTeaFallOut

I completely agree and am waiting for such an expert to enlighten us.