The R0 of the flu is that low due to a vaccine being available. R0 value fluctuates drastically per region with any new virus. If we didn't haven't a vaccine for the flu it would kill far more people than Covid is currently.
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This lousy thread has pushed my blocked list to capacity
No way to know really but I would say probably about the same because all I've heard from media outlets from day 1 is that nothing is really effective in treating Covid and ventilators are basically useless beyond prolonging suffering. So...they had masks in 1918.
This is literally what the doctors in Tennessee were arguing last week when they lobbied the governor to enact statewide mandates regarding Covid safety. So if nothing is effective in treating Covid and no one understands it and it's basically a death sentence (as many want us to believe) then modern medicine doesn't matter....right?
Ventilators would have still been ineffective then. Cytokine storm is what killed people and vast majority in their 20s and early 30s. They died like 2 or 3 days after developing symptoms due to Cytokine storm. Folks that died would change color to blue or black from such a quick depletion of oxygen.
That's the very conservative estimate.
Elderly actually survived it much better due to immune systems not being so responsive to flu's invasion into the body. The vast majority of folks that died were in 20s and 30s.
Read The Great Influenza. That flu is much worse than this one. Survival rate for folks in 20s and 30s was almost nonexistent.
I concur with dawgday; The Great Influenza is an excellent and informative book.
That estimate is based on excess deaths. There were 150,000 excess deaths from March - June 13th this year.
But like you said, there's a huge difference in the age group that is dying.
Getting back to the point of all this, I really don't think that "way more people would die from the flu" if we had no flu vaccine. Excess deaths could be > 300k by the end of this year. Using the worst flu in our history as a benchmark, covid is still outpacing it.
This exactly. As I stated previously: the flu season taxes hospital capacity every year. It is not uncommon for hospitals to divert critical care and emergency patients to other hospitals due to over-capacity issues during a REGULAR flu season.
This is why I don't understand moving fall sports back further into the flu season. It's dumb. They should actually be starting sooner rather than later.