It’s a bit low contrast but have you spotted the scroll bar to the right of the posts?
Thanks, I see it now.
The point being missed by Nigel - and barely acknowledged by Spiegelhalter is that the excess mortality risk is not the price of inaction - it is the price of the current level of lockdown.
It is partly my fault. The title asks “what is so different between Flu & Covid 19?”
I was not referring to its clinical or biological differences, I think most people know how a virus spreads.
I had hoped to fuel discussion as to what made THIS virus prompt a shutdown of much of the planet when the evidence of its virulence had yet to fully manifest itself.
The figures for “normal” flu from the National Statistics Office showed that in 2018/19 it finished 23,000 people in England, this with a vaccine. This passed without any comment as I suppose it is “just one of those things”. No campaign to restrict the spread of this virus.
At the time of my post 233 people had died as a consequence of Covid 19 so its actual track record at that time did not seem to warrant the actions that followed, thus my comment “…virus that generally is no more lethal than those that have come before…”. Since I wrote that more information has emerged which shows that not to be the case.
Yes, I can see the necessity for the actions & yes, I understand the need to ensure that our hospitals are not overwhelmed but it is not so much the validity & importance of the current actions but the LACK of them for the less virulent but no less fatal flu virus of previous years.
The amount of potential job losses & the economic effects will no doubt manifest itself in changes in social behaviour, & I don’t mean the frivolous idea of not being able to buy bigger TVs or take foreign holidays, because there could well be more violence, theft, depression & mental health issues. These need to be considered too, however unpopular the idea may be.
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It’s hard to go back in time but it appears that there was enough information available when you posted for others to see the potential of the new virus.
That’s all in the past and we now have a lot more information but the future in medical, social and economic terms still appears to need a good crystal ball.
Sure, but why did we not see similar measures in previous years?
You can’t stop people from dying.
You say lack of action but that’s not true. Annual flu vaccinations are available to everyone and are provided free of charge to some categories. That’s a massive action. Without it, I guess we’d be in potentially the same situation we are in with Covid19. BUT we have the vaccination and that is the action we take. People die, health services might struggle for a few weeks, but it’s nothing we can’t cope with.
Whereas, all the signs indicated that the consequences of taking no action over coronavirus would be way too much to cope with.
That’s the difference. Cope-withable without taking drastic action, or not cope-witheable without taking drastic action. Flu, now, yes. Coronavirus, right now, no.
I get your point Anna, but even with the vaccine, which is not compulsory, the death toll was twice what the current Covid toll is today. By action I really refer to the lockdown & social distancing rather than medical treatment.
Here I get offered the vaccine anually as I fall into the “vunerable” category - I don’t tend to take it as it seems to give me symptoms!
At the moment most people are focused on the direct effect of the virus on the physical body - infection, treatment, mortality, etc - but perhaps we ought to be looking much further ahead at the future consequences of the lockdown too.
Also it is how ill people are before they recover, a lot more people seem to be a lot more ill than with flu. These people have a reasonable chance of recovery with hospital / intensive care and should be given that chance but that means having the beds and staff available so trying to reduce numbers
Yes but we “know” flu. It’s seasonal, it starts towards the end of the year and by February it’s all over bar the shouting. We grit our teeth and get through flu season, then we can forget about it for the rest of the year.
So far there’s no indication that coronavirus is seasonal. It’s currently thriving in all climates.
If flu stayed with us all year round, it would be a bigger problem. So yes, IF flu stayed with us all year round AND we didn’t have a vaccine, we would be in the same position we’re in with coronavirus - except that coronavirus seems to be more contagious and more virulent. But it IS seasonal and we DO have a vaccine, and those two things make all the difference.
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Even with all the measure taken, the general consensus seems to be that we’re still not past the peak. So we can expect the death toll to at least double before we’re through. Imagine what the figure would be if no measures had been taken.
I also believe that you are way too high with your average annual flu toll which is skewing your views. I know you found that figure published somewhere but everything else I’ve seen contradicts it.
Public Health England estimates that on average 17,000 people have died from the flu in England annually between 2014/15 and 2018/19. However, the yearly deaths vary widely from a high of 28,330 in 2014/15 to a low of 1,692 in 2018/19. Public Health England does not publish a mortality rate for the flu.
I understand what you are saying.
I’m just trying to get my head around the fact that as you say, we “know” flu, it is seasonal & there is a vaccine but in the short time that it appears it still sees 23,000 people to their graves & that is seen as a success, enough that during the flu season there is no need to publish any information at all, nada, not even a rehash of the “coughs & sneezes spread diseases” adverts of old.
It is true that the vaccine means that much of the population has an immunity so that the chances of suffering is less but one day, hopefully soon, a vaccine will be found for this one too. Unfortunately there will be no vaccine for the damage done to society in general.
I am NOT advocating a relaxation of current precautions - these are exactly the right actions, but just throwing out theories about our future. I feel that it should be allowed bearing in mind all the other speculation that others have quoted.
You are still fixated with the death figures, it is about numbers infected and seriously ill
Who sees it as a success?
It’s deplorable. It’s deplorable that people die of cancer and all the other diseases that we can’t eliminate or cure. But we have to accept it because we can’t prevent it.
Society will recover.
The economy will recover.
Whether things go back to exactly how they were before, remains to be seen.
I would like to be a fly on the wall a generation down the line in a classroom (if they still exist), in a history lesson (I hope kids will still learn history) where kids are being taught about the great health crisis of 2020. I would love to know what conclusions will have been drawn and what lessons will have been learnt.
I used the govenment’s own figures - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/annual-flu-reports
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Perhaps “success” is the wrong word. try “acceptable”.
I think I can see why we are not quite understanding each other. You may be looking at this from a clinical angle while I am looking at the problem from a political one. Thus my conspiracy theory in the title & it is, after all, only that, a theory.
Once again we did not try to stop the world for seasonal 'flu because - up to a few weeks ago - anyone who was that ill with 'flu would have, where necessary, been hospitalised and the number of cases was not so many that it crippled the NHS, or caused us to run out of body bags.
Covid was, from the start, a novel, highly transmissible virus with a unknown but probably high mortality (over all cases it is probably 10x that of 'flu). those who understood how pandemics work and how quickly exponential growth takes off once it becomes established quickly realised it would swamp our health services.
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Covid 19 spreads the same way flu does. It can survive outside the host for far longer though which is why it can spread further. I am surprised that the 12000 extra deaths has caused the UK to run out of body bags. I would have thought that the MoD & various aid agencies would be able to rustle up a few, particularly when we are led to believe that not all bodies need to be put in them.
Although the virus is certainly far more virulent than Flu, being infected is not automatically lethal. Small compensation for sufferers, I know, but with possibly an 85% recovery rate the news is not all bad.
Recovery rate is vastly better than that. 50% (possibly much more) probably have no or very few symptoms. 35% have a bad dose of a flu like illness that keeps them off work. Maybe 15% require hospital admission & one fifth of those require ventilation on ICU ie 3% & half of those will not survive. The recovery rate is 98-99%. Some 'flu pandemics have had even worse mortality rates.
Exactly! The death rate is nothing like Ebola (about 50%). The Black Death killed 30% of the population of Europe. Even in the worst case with COVID-19 the excess death rate will be about 600,000 or 1% of the population. A disaster if all 600,000 deaths occur in a couple of months (plus several million very sick people needing hospital ) but manageable if the rate of spread can be curtailed with various lockdown measures so this happened over 12-18 months.