I’m not a statistician, or a scientist. As a layperson, I look at where the rubber hits the road. How many people died, and how does that compare to other times? As far as I can tell from what I hear, we’re getting in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths in this country, which will likely go to, maybe 150 by year’s end? What I’ve seen of the flu is that a bad-ish year is 80-100,000. The kind of year we have a couple of times a decade. When we don’t do everything imaginable to destroy the economy, and tear apart the fabric of a society and culture. Now, I do respect people’s desire to distance themselves, and I wear a mask in the stores to make others comfortable, but I also try to keep some perspective, and be as active as I can. As for your analysis, why don’t we have 59 times as many deaths from the Covid virus as we usually do from the flu? Just asking as a stupid paperhanger who didn’t major in science.
The average over the last 19 years is 37,462 deaths per year.
COVID we knew going into it would be different, so we reacted. The deaths you're quoting and projecting for COVID reflects the lock down.
So you're comparing COVID deaths WITH a lock down to FLU deaths without a lock down.
We've had 1,666,000 known cases of COVID this year so far. The CDC estimates an average of 28.6 million cases of flu each year. So one of the reasons we are at 2.5 times deaths of an average flue season, instead of 59 times is that not as many people have caught COVID as normally get the flu. Thanks in large part to the shut downs, social distancing and some people wearing masks.
"CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million – 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010." - same cdc source.
uh, because the case rate stopped increasing 10-fold per week when we started social distancing? Just sayin'