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2019-20 flu season: 0.02% total excess deaths in Europe

5 points by alejohausner ↗ HN
EuroMOMO tracks mortality statistics from european countries. I went to EuroMOMO.com, and looked at their charts. By adding up the number from 2019 week 40 to 2019 to week 20, which covers the usual flu season, I came up with 100,804 excess deaths. The same period in the 2017-2018 winter season gave me 59,718 excess deaths (the 2018-19 flu season was less deadly).

The population of countries that participate in EuroMOMO is 468 million people. This tells me that the excess death rate this flu season was 0.022%, compared to 0.013% for the 2017-2018 season.

This was a bad season, but not apocalyptic by any means. Should health agencies take credit for a successful intervention, or is covid-19 just not as deadly as first feared?

9 comments

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beamatronic
Whether you believe that COVID-19 is more deadly or not, there is no disputing the horrendous after-effects that up to 40% of survivors are suffering. Every physician is saying the same thing: You do not want this virus.
patatino
40% of all survivors including the people who had no or mild symptoms?
demygale
The citation needed anti-science crowd comes out hard in any HN COVID-19 discussion. I don’t know about you guys but the only sources I need are Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. Scientists are just trying to mind control us with scary science!
sethammons
good question. Without random tests, I'm not sure if we even have a clue as to what percent of the population has had this. As such, we can't say how many are negatively affected after. In cases where people were admitted to a facility, we can follow up, but that is already selection bias.
mrfusion
What’s you’re source on that? You realize 25% of NYC are “survivors” of COVID.
demygale
You’ve done some math.

But consider that virus scientists, epidemiologists, front line health care workers, and hospital administrators have concluded that COVID-19 is much worse than the seasonal flu.

Your math does not explain full ICUs and government officials begging for medical ventilators. It’s not the flu.

Have you considered reading the thoughts and opinions of people paid to be experts on this?

alejohausner
I agree that covid-19 symptoms are much worse than the flu, and that hospital ICUs sometimes strained to keep up with the number of cases. But ultimately the number of deaths has to be considered as a kind of ground truth.

On officials begging for ventilators: I did see NY state governor Cuomo's press conferences, where he complained about shortages of ventilators. I think that he is fascinating and charismatic. I would vote for him. But it's widely acknowledged that 80% of people on ventilators eventually die. Ventilators themselves may be deadly, at least for the kind of pulmonary edema that covid-19 causes. Much better survival rates have been reported by laying patients face down, with oxygen, and without forced ventilation. It's quite possible that some of the deadliness of this disease can be put down to misguided treatment protocols.

This disease is dramatic and sometimes deadly, but it's not the Spanish flu by any means. There has been a lot hysteria and over-reaction.