I follow news about Covid only loosely, but I once somewhere [citation needed] saw a graph that showed mortality over years, where the annual flue was a light bump, and Covid was a slightly bigger bump.Originally Posted by francois
50 years ago, without current analytical methods, Covid would have gone unnoticed by the general population. Only statisticians would have noticed that there is an increased mortality above natural fluctuations.
DoubleDutch (December 30th, 2021), goji (December 30th, 2021)
Such data exists.
Also, our life expectancy is better than 20 years ago, possibly better than 10 years ago. We're living in one of the best periods ever for life expectancy. COVID is just some minor noise overlaid on the graph showing good long term trends.
In the USA, Covid was the third leading cause of death in 2020 accounting for 350,831 deaths while Influenza/Pneumonia was the ninth leading cause at 53,544 deaths.That is a six fold difference. Admittedly, most of the deaths were those over 50 years of age, which if one is younger, it might just be a bump but, to me, it is a human life lost.
”lost”? I do hope they find it again. An American evangelist once asked me if I had found the Lord. I replied that I didn’t know he was lost
Wonder no more Stevie, lost is an euphemism for someone who died,as if you didn't know.
Lower middle class euphemismWonder no more Stevie, lost is an euphemism for someone who died,as if you didn't know.
"50 years ago" would have been in the 1970s. Influenza vaccines were developed in the 1940s, when influenza was already known. Covid-19 vaccines were developed after the beginning of the pandemic. So the comparison is flawed.
The BMJ has an interesting report - "Covid and flu: what do the numbers tell us about morbidity and deaths? (https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2514) - pointing out that reported deaths from influenza often include deaths from pneumonia, so the figures for influenza deaths are usually under-reporting actual ones. The report includes the comment: "In the UK the Health Foundation has articulated the difference in impact between flu and covid in terms of life years. “In a bad flu year on average around 30 000 people in the UK die from flu and pneumonia, with a loss of around 250 000 life years. This is a sixth of the life years lost to covid-19,” it noted."
Demographers estimate the global population in 1918 at about 1.8 billion persons. The 1918 "Spanish Flu" or H1N1 pandemic killed somewhere around 50 million people worldwide. These figures suggest that about 30% of the world’s population was infected during that pandemic and that it killed about 2.7% of that population (https://www.marshallindependent.com/...-then-and-now/). People noticed.
An interesting phenomenon of the Covid-19 pandemic is that the annual death rate influenza has declined - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...rticle/2783644.
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