>The Spanish flu was previously the disease event that caused the biggest loss of life in the United States; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 675,000 Americans died during the 1918 That's great, now do per capita, the population has, what, tripled since then? >U.S. deaths make up roughly 14% of the nearly 4.7 million fatalities that have been reported worldwide in this pandemic to date, ev…
You have been downvoted for heresy. You are hereby sentenced to reside in the gray dungeon where you shall share a cell with Copernicus and other perfidious deniers.
Suppose I go to the hospital with a stubbed toe. They test me with PCR and the test detects fragments of dead inactive virus from a month ago when my immune system defeated it. I therefore test "positive" for COVID. They give me the vaccine, which promptly kills me from a combination of stroke, heart attack, and multiple organ failure. This would be recorded as a COVID death, and I would be considered "unvaccinated".…
It's recommended that people wait a few weeks after recovering before getting the COVID vaccine, so they probably wouldn't offer it to you immediately in the hospital if you tested positive: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
> The Spanish flu was previously the disease event that caused the biggest loss of life in the United States; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 675,000 Americans died during the 1918 pandemic, in waves of illness that stretched out over roughly two years in this country. > According to STAT’s Covid-19 Tracker, Covid deaths stand at more than 675,400. Why are we comparing raw numbers? If one…
Because otherwise a car crash in a small town would be equivalent to a major terror attack in NYC, or Jack the ripper could be considered a minor offender compared to a modern day involuntary manslaughter. There is a time and place for normalized statistics, but for some situations, loss of life is something that matters. Edit: I got the arrow of time mixed up in the jack the ripper example, but you get the idea.
Or to put it another way, there is no such thing as a fraction of a human life.
The first post, the lab alert from 7/21/21, withdraws the request for Emergency Use Authorization for the PCR test. The second clarification post explains why, in that the "CDC began distributing the CDC 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCOV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel to fill a gap. The wide availability of other SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic tests means that the CDC 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Di…
From the first post: "In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses." TL;DR "Move on from the…
As the CDC points out in the clarification, the PCR test only detects SARS-CoV-2, not influenza:
"The CDC 2019-nCoV Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel does not confuse influenza with SARS-CoV-2."
Suggesting that labs use testing methods that can differentiate between SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses does not equate to PCR tests not being able to differentiate between the two.
>Because otherwise a car crash in a small town would be equivalent to a major terror attack in NYC You can probably adjust for this using some sort of statistical significance test. However, without actually doing the test I'll go on a limb and say that the world's population wasn't small enough in 1918 that this phenomena (ie. n being too small) would skew the results.
World population in 1920 was presumably somewhere between 1.6bn and 2bn: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat... so 4-5x smaller than now.
Right, but that's not small enough to make a difference. To go to the extreme, if your population size was 100, and some guy died of the flu, that's a 1% death rate! That doesn't actually mean the death rate of the flu is actually 1%, because you don't know whether that guy just happened to die because your group was unlucky, or that the death rate is 1%. As your population size gets bigger this becomes less of a problem. For instance, if your population was 1,000,000 and 10,000 died of the flu you can be fairly certain the death rate is actually 1%. With that in mind, you can intuit that the difference between between 1.6bn and 2bn (1920) and 7 billion (today) is negligible, although feel free to quantify this with actual calculations.
Because otherwise a car crash in a small town would be equivalent to a major terror attack in NYC, or Jack the ripper could be considered a minor offender compared to a modern day involuntary manslaughter. There is a time and place for normalized statistics, but for some situations, loss of life is something that matters. Edit: I got the arrow of time mixed up in the jack the ripper example, but you get the idea.
No one is saying loss of life doesn't matter, but if we're wanting to figure out "which disease is deadliest," the result should help you in your answer to the question "if you had to get one of these 2 diseases, which would you rather?" Factoring in population and age is absolutely important to knowing how deadly a disease is. There's other factors too that may bump in favor of the 1918 flu being less deadly, like t…
I don't know if "if you had to get one of these 2 diseases, which would you rather?" is really a meaningful question across centuries. The main treatment for Spanish flu was aspirin (!), and many previously very deadly diseases are now trivially treatable with antibiotics. The question I was thinking about is more along the lines of "how terrible an event in world history is this", and I think there it is absolutely fair to look at absolute numbers, and absolutely expected that more terrible events will happen as population increases.
> The Spanish flu was previously the disease event that caused the biggest loss of life in the United States; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 675,000 Americans died during the 1918 pandemic, in waves of illness that stretched out over roughly two years in this country. > According to STAT’s Covid-19 Tracker, Covid deaths stand at more than 675,400. Why are we comparing raw numbers? If one…
Don't forget to account for the fact they didn't have vaccines during the 1918 pandemic.
> The Spanish flu was previously the disease event that caused the biggest loss of life in the United States; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 675,000 Americans died during the 1918 pandemic, in waves of illness that stretched out over roughly two years in this country. > According to STAT’s Covid-19 Tracker, Covid deaths stand at more than 675,400. Why are we comparing raw numbers? If one…
You’re arguing that as population increases, individual lives become less important?
I'm mildly annoyed by journalists calling "Spanish Flu" where the 1918 Flu Pandemic had no relationship with Spain. The author could have titled the piece as "Covid-19 overtakes 1918 flu pandemic as deadliest disease in American history" and later, inside the article include some kind of note about that in that time, it was called (mistakenly) "Spanish flu". I'm not advocating for "cancel culture" or auto-censorship…
That is what is is known by. If they wrote 1918 flu pandemic more readers would be confused.
I'm mildly annoyed by journalists calling "Spanish Flu" where the 1918 Flu Pandemic had no relationship with Spain. The author could have titled the piece as "Covid-19 overtakes 1918 flu pandemic as deadliest disease in American history" and later, inside the article include some kind of note about that in that time, it was called (mistakenly) "Spanish flu". I'm not advocating for "cancel culture" or auto-censorship…
You might have a good point but changing it now would just be confusing. Historically it has been called the Spanish Flu and I assume everything referencing it during that time uses the word Spanish. I think a mention of how it wasn't actually from Spain is plenty good, there's no reason to alter the name. I think it's good that everyone knows it was historically called the Spanish Flu.
In the same way that Native-Americans are not called redskins anymore, I'd expect more empathy towards Spaniards.