Makes you wonder how many deaths a year could be prevented if people just wore masks in a few select places during the winter like mass transit and other crowded areas. Been common in many Asian countries since SARS and honestly isn’t any sort of real inconvenience.
it’s crazy that all flu deaths suddenly disappeared. It’s great to see the US had an extended period of health and prosperity!
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The world did so well with masking and social distancing that at least one variant of the flu went extinct!
So, what we learned today: masks protect against the flu, too. Who would have thought it?
Hmm… I should get my flu shot.
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Gee what happened from 2020-2021? Were we just really healthy?
Yo I’ve been sick with Flu A (confirmed at Dr) for like 10 days and it’s ROUGH. Everyone in my family who got their shot was either fine or had very mild illness! I skipped my shot this year cause I was regular sick the day of my appointment. I wont miss it again.
And I still work with people that claim that social distancing and masks didn’t work.
Why it picks up in Dec-Feb period every year?
ITT: yass queen, wearing masks helped sooo much with eliminating influenza cases!!!11!!
They just attributed the affluenza deaths to COVID, for political effect. It is painfully obvious.
Why do we think deaths went up higher than before the pandemic?
“Its just a flu” – you can calculate influenza desths over covid and come to a conclusion that its magnitude higher
cool what did the rest of the annual/weekly mortality look like when people weren’t dying of influenza?
I love death 👍 but hate hate hate influenza 😁😡
Turns out the things people did to avoid getting COVID are also very effective at slowing the spread of the various influenza viruses. 🦠
Surely none of the missing flu deaths were reported as covid right?
This is something relatively important to note when people talk about future pandemics. Covid ‘broke through’ because it started out with an extremely high R0 of 4-5 and mutated rapidly all the way to 10+ by Omicron. That is very rare for any virus.
But even very basic precautions such a marginal increase in mask wearing and hand washing can reduce the R0 for many viruses below 1, and that can be enough to prevent an outbreak from happening at all for viruses like influenza which have an R0 of only 1.2-1.3.
This is why some epidemiologists are a bit hesitant to truly freak out over Bird Flu. It is likely to become a problem, but the chances it spreads the way covid did are slim to none. Even marginal precautions can prevent an outbreak from taking place. Its more likely to emerge like ebola, with outbreaks in poor regions here or there. In the end, its still influenza, which has pretty much always had a relatively low R0 and struggles to mutate for transmissibility the way coronaviruses do.
2018 flu was brutal. I did a final 20 mile long run, ready to taper for my marathon 3 weeks later and was very fit. Got flu A the next day from my 2 year old who had it bad and couldn’t run again for a month and had to rebuild much of my fitness. OG Covid took me out for longer just 2 years later.
A lot of vulnerable people never went out. But what kind of quality of life is that?
wonder if that milder but longer flu season in 2022 could be attributed to a loss of herd immunity after the lockdowns stopped the 2021 season from happening
Honestly though, what are the chances people still died from the flu during the covid years and it was accidentally labeled as Covid
“CDC uses a mathematical model to estimate the annual number of flu illnesses, medical visits, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States”
28 comments
Data source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2024-2025/data/NCHSData52.csv
Software used: SAS
Makes you wonder how many deaths a year could be prevented if people just wore masks in a few select places during the winter like mass transit and other crowded areas. Been common in many Asian countries since SARS and honestly isn’t any sort of real inconvenience.
it’s crazy that all flu deaths suddenly disappeared. It’s great to see the US had an extended period of health and prosperity!
[removed]
The world did so well with masking and social distancing that at least one variant of the flu went extinct!
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/18/nx-s1-5155997/influenza-strains-disappearance-attributed-to-covid-protocols-alters-2024-flu-shot
Really gets that noggin’ joggin’.
So, what we learned today: masks protect against the flu, too. Who would have thought it?
Hmm… I should get my flu shot.
[removed]
Gee what happened from 2020-2021? Were we just really healthy?
Yo I’ve been sick with Flu A (confirmed at Dr) for like 10 days and it’s ROUGH. Everyone in my family who got their shot was either fine or had very mild illness! I skipped my shot this year cause I was regular sick the day of my appointment. I wont miss it again.
And I still work with people that claim that social distancing and masks didn’t work.
Why it picks up in Dec-Feb period every year?
ITT: yass queen, wearing masks helped sooo much with eliminating influenza cases!!!11!!
They just attributed the affluenza deaths to COVID, for political effect. It is painfully obvious.
Why do we think deaths went up higher than before the pandemic?
Pre-2020 total deaths in the US follow very stable, predictable trends. Post-2020 the impact of COVID way more than offsets any lives saved from reduced flu deaths. [source](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/stories/2022/03/united-states-deaths-spiked-as-covid-19-continued-figure-2.jpg)
Man I wonder where all those cases went in 2020
“Its just a flu” – you can calculate influenza desths over covid and come to a conclusion that its magnitude higher
cool what did the rest of the annual/weekly mortality look like when people weren’t dying of influenza?
I love death 👍 but hate hate hate influenza 😁😡
Turns out the things people did to avoid getting COVID are also very effective at slowing the spread of the various influenza viruses. 🦠
Surely none of the missing flu deaths were reported as covid right?
This is something relatively important to note when people talk about future pandemics. Covid ‘broke through’ because it started out with an extremely high R0 of 4-5 and mutated rapidly all the way to 10+ by Omicron. That is very rare for any virus.
But even very basic precautions such a marginal increase in mask wearing and hand washing can reduce the R0 for many viruses below 1, and that can be enough to prevent an outbreak from happening at all for viruses like influenza which have an R0 of only 1.2-1.3.
This is why some epidemiologists are a bit hesitant to truly freak out over Bird Flu. It is likely to become a problem, but the chances it spreads the way covid did are slim to none. Even marginal precautions can prevent an outbreak from taking place. Its more likely to emerge like ebola, with outbreaks in poor regions here or there. In the end, its still influenza, which has pretty much always had a relatively low R0 and struggles to mutate for transmissibility the way coronaviruses do.
2018 flu was brutal. I did a final 20 mile long run, ready to taper for my marathon 3 weeks later and was very fit. Got flu A the next day from my 2 year old who had it bad and couldn’t run again for a month and had to rebuild much of my fitness. OG Covid took me out for longer just 2 years later.
A lot of vulnerable people never went out. But what kind of quality of life is that?
wonder if that milder but longer flu season in 2022 could be attributed to a loss of herd immunity after the lockdowns stopped the 2021 season from happening
Honestly though, what are the chances people still died from the flu during the covid years and it was accidentally labeled as Covid
“CDC uses a mathematical model to estimate the annual number of flu illnesses, medical visits, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States”
This isn’t even real data.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu-burden/php/about/how-cdc-estimates.html
If you have terminal cancer but get hit by a bus and die, did you die of cancer or the bus?
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