Something like a billion people got H1N1. There certainly are tens of millions of US flu cases annually.
If I’m doing the math correctly, (which is always a big if for me), then:
8000 deaths at .02 % mortality rate mean ~ 4,000,000 people caught the flu.
4,000,000 at 3% mortality rate is 120,000 deaths.
40 million, not 4 million
Right I get that. I don’t think their point though was to whatabout flu but to point out that flu is also bad and you should take steps to protect yourself from it and the chances of dying from it are not zero
8000*(3/.02) is 1.2 million.
No there is a ton of whataboutism to laugh at all the people panicking about this virus.
And lolz at my maths.
(Turns out I set the math up properly but just missed a zero in .02% and used .002 instead of .0002, so I’m dumb but not as dumb as I thought.)
I was being facetious
- British Airways has suspended all flights to and from mainland China
- Australia’s 600 evacuees will be held on Christmas Island for two weeks
interesting video series
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Christmas Island sounds festive
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what do they have on Christmas Island?
It’s not. It’s where Australia use to have its refugee concentration camps, before we outsourced them to other countries like Papua New Guinea
So it’s already got the facilities.
The only time I’ve ever gotten the flu (that I’m aware of), it was H1N1 my senior year of college. I’ll piggyback on everyone else’s comments and say the flu is no joke, I was out of commission for a full week and it took a lot longer until I felt normal again.
In terms of mortality numbers, ESPECIALLY in the US, anyone who looks around at data on particular conditions will find it from comfortably accurate to LOL bad.
Part of the reason for this is that the feds refuse to pay for autopsy results - and they aren’t cheap - a vague guess runs between 3-5 K, and the hospital gets paid nothing. If you’re a victim of a crime, or for some reason grandma dies and someone wants to get a private autopsy done, it gets done - which is close enough to never to be an accurate number in terms of demographics. (The numbers get slightly better for pediatric patients, primarily because no one wants to miss a suspicious death, for reasons that should be obvious)
So the problem we have is that we’re likely VASTLY underestimating influenza deaths. A lot of those patients are elderly, a lot of them have DNR/DNI orders, or they just pass away at age 78 in their sleep (which is certainly what I hope to do.) The next morning, the nursing home doc wanders in, checks a couple of boxes and the patient is released to their family. No one is going to try to suss out whether out the inciting event was pneumonia/influenza/CAD/stroke/urosepsis or a dozen other things - but those goddam boxes MUST BE CHECKED, or you can’t release the body.
And for the most part this is fine - we’re all gonna go sometime, and so what. But this idea that Quincy is doing 20 autopsies a day between martini’s is, and has always been, total bullshit.
Where this stuff breaks down is where a non-standard event occurs - SARS/MERS/corona sort of things. What appropriately happens is that ASAP everyone gets tested/isolated while this stuff gets sorted out. It’s going to take a while to figure out what the numbers actually mean - say what percentage that are infected with Corona are asymptomatic/carriers/slightly sick/in trouble/dead - but it’s going to take a while. For now, I’d watch carefully the number of critically ill/fatal incidences in Europe/US, because I (kind of) trust the numbers. China - I dunno - their track record in terms of their public health in terms of epidemiology is…questionable, although it appears to be a lot better than what it was. It’s possible like Corona has been around for years, a case here and there and for some reason took off - there are arguments for something similar in HIV (speaking ONLY about the episodic nature of the event) and there have been several other bugs that have showed up, killed a fair amount of people, and then faded away - Machaupo or Lassa come to mind, although those were the classic and evil hemorrhagic fever types and Corona seems in a half-ass way more like influenza - but this is all too soon to tell.
MM MD
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Couldn’t they do a comparison of all-cause mortality of olds during flu season and not flu season to get a ballpark idea of how badly flu deaths are undercounted?
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Some flu seasons are much worse than others - which could complicate that.
I’d guess SOME effort is made, but how many percentage points you’re talking is really unclear to me.
Other problems come up when whoever decides a particular death “counts” - Back in the day when I was training in Chicago, the coroner office was so backlogged (bodies where stacked up in fridges to the max) that the working assumption was that any male over 45 and any female over 50 was signed out as “Acute coronary syndrome” and the file was closed. We argued that if you had a spouse you wanted to get rid of it was a golden opportunity, cause unless someone found an actual bullet hole they were going to the funeral parlor. (From what I understand, it’s improved from that time)
Lastly, since until recently I was one of the guys actually signing death certificates - I would do my best/make my best guess - but the paperwork reads like stereo instructions, the funeral home wants the body released (no funeral until death cert is OK) and BTW I have an acute MI coming in in 3 minutes and a possible leaking aorta two doors down - so yeah. There is pretty much no mechanism in place beyond the good will of the doc signing the cert to assure that the data is IMO accurate - not that I’m suggesting people are purposely doing the wrong thing - but there are a lot of reasons that the priority for this stuff is minimal. Until (like with Corona) it needs to be.
MM MD
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That fact might actually make it easier, assuming that the number of uncounted flu deaths is proportional to the number of counted flu deaths. This sort of study would have to be done over a bunch of years I think, and you could look to see if years with a bad flu season has a higher all cause mortality over the counted flu deaths.