> given the rate of deaths are 10-20x worse than the worst flu years.
I have a hard time accepting this premise. Mostly because the flu was somehow eradicated at the outset of mass covid testing, many of the covid tests did not distinguish between the flu and covid. Furthermore, I believe that we actually responded to covid in a way that caused excess covid deaths by over counting deaths and actively suppressing unpatentable treatments for covid. I think we hospitalized people that didn't need to be hospitalized, and we told people not to do anything until they needed to be hospitalized. We then started putting too many people on vents, giving them Remdesiver(toxic with highly questionable efficacy), and putting covid patients in nursing homes with the most vulnerable population. Not to mention lockdowns that pushed a huge portion of the world into poverty, nutritional deficiency, and much more susceptible to adverse effects from disease as a result.
But those are just my thoughts- I don't think we have good enough data, nor will we ever- to actually make strong conclusions either way.
> the flu was somehow eradicated at the outset of mass covid testing,
Did you know "the flu" is actually many strains, the most prevalent of which changes season to season? It is not surprising to me that Covid "won out" this season. Plus a record number of people got the flu vaccine during the pandemic. Here is what the CDC says about lower flu numbers [1]
> many of the covid tests did not distinguish between the flu and covid.
That's just not true.
> lockdowns that pushed a huge portion of the world into poverty
What would you do to mitigate the spread of a pandemic?
Thanks for clarifying the flu details. As for lockdowns- hindsight is 20/20, but I would do the following-
Issue public health advisory encouraging people to eat healthier, exercise, and possibly even offer subsidies on healthy groceries and vitamins. Vitamin D deficiency is highly correlated to negative outcomes with covid infection. To this day, our federal health organizations haven't even issued statements encouraging people to eat healthier or even do something simple and easy like address vitamin D deficiency. The messaging has been negligent at best.
I would not engage in a fear campaign, and lock people inside. Most spread was occuring between family members confining themselves inside, and stress wreaks havoc on your immune system. We've been subjected to fear induced mass psychosis for the past two years, and as a result have acquired a learned helplessness when it comes to our personal health.
I would also take steps to address to hospital staffing and capacity issues. In the USA, hospitals always run at near capacity, for financial reasons. Instead of refusing to upset that delicate balance game they play, incentives should have been put into to place to bolster staffing so that hospitals wouldn't be overwhelmed. Simply not using hospitals had the effect of killing many more people that were now missing early health screenings.
I would have also liked to see only the most vulnerable be locked down, and only on a volunteer basis. A western, non authoritarian government, has no way to truly implement lockdowns effectively. Partial lockdowns have no benefits, since they didn't actually stop the spread of anything. Instead they caused irreparable harm where they were implemented with very little benefit. Basically security theater. I understand the original intentions, but the prolonged lockdowns, justified by poor metrics of "success" quickly became a political response instead of a scientific response.
Lastly, outpatient clinical attempts at treating covid with repurposed existing drugs should have been prioritized. Trump's warp speed and prep act created insane incentives to actively hamper any attempts to treat covid except pharma approved methods. This whole response feels like the AIDS response all over again, except with more media coverage, widespread corruption, and money at play.
I'm sorry you perceive the messaging as fear-based. Indeed the facts of a pandemic are scary but I don't think the intent of sharing facts is to induce fear. Rather, it is to share information and prepare the public.
Regarding hospital staffing, I'm not sure where money for that would come from if not largely paid by patients or insurance plans. I certainly wouldn't want to see that whole system become state-owned. We should encourage rather than stifle competition.
> the flu was somehow eradicated at the outset of mass covid testing, many of the covid tests did not distinguish between the flu and covid.
What do you mean when you say that tests did not distinguish between COVID and the flu? Are you referring to simultaneous infection? I'm not aware of any PCR or antigen tests for COVID which would produce positive results for flu patients. Nor any antigen or rapid molecular assays for the flu which would produce positives for COVID patients.
Seems much more reasonable that social distancing and masking significantly reduced flu transmission.
Which appears to use one sentence, taken out of context (read the very next sentence), from a CDC post recommending that PCRs be used to test for both flu and covid simultaneously because, well, we're in flu season and people might have either one when they show up at a hospital sick.
The flu has a basic reproductive rate much lower than the coronavirus. By the time mass covid testing started and flu season came, the public health measures were so severe one would expect them to basically eradicate the flu, and they were keeping COVID close to the rate of eradication, but were relaxed every time before that happened.
> Mostly because the flu was somehow eradicated at the outset of mass covid testing (...)
Perhaps all those basic public health measures implemented to contain and eliminate the spread of air borne diseases such as COVID or the flu is a factor?
I mean,the lockdowns alone have a clear and critical and measurable (and measured) impact in lowering the spread of COVID. Wouldn't it be possible that staying away from people with the flu was also a factor in not catching the flu?
Attempts to measure the impact of lockdowns have produced a wide range of results. The impact is far from clear and there are numerous confounding variables that are impossible to control. The data has been manipulated for political purposes on both sides of the issue.
"Worst" flu years must be quite selectively chosen. Clearly the Spanish Flu was much worse than COVID.
If you go by age-adjusted excess mortality then most countries reached levels last seen about a decade ago, more or less. The UK for example I think was 'rolled back' to 2007/2008 levels of mortality, Sweden back to 2012.
So 10x worse than worst flu years just doesn't seem right at all and I wonder where you got that stat. One thing that is clear is that the general population systematically over-estimates the severity of COVID by orders of magnitude.
There's a similar French poll out there, probably they exist for many countries. IFR estimates in these polls are wild, like 100x-200x higher than the correct values. So it's worth checking that you're familiar with the true numbers, as many people aren't, yet think they're well informed.
