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The flu vaccine is based on an educated "guess" about which variants will be prevalent that winter - and sometimes it is wrong (with more cases) or a more serious variant emerges (swine flu, Russian flu, etc). It will still act to reduce the overall impact of flu, but some years it works better than others.

 

Three things:

1) Flu death numbers are actually deaths caused by flu, as opposed to Covid "deaths" which as we know are anyone who died who at any point in their lives either tested positive for Covid or were suspected to have Covid (as per the "urgent review"). So the numbers are clearly not in any way comparable.

2) As you pointed out, there are some years with high spikes - incidentally significantly higher than the amount of mortality currently being seen in Greater Manchester, which is now locked down. If I agree with your point that we have to draw the line somewhere - which I do - why the inconsistency in where the line is being drawn?

3) Flu's demographic is different. There are some years in the last 20 where over 100 children or infants have died of flu in England and Wales. Wouldn't we have been more justified in closing schools during those years than for Covid this year?

 

Can you post the source where you have got the child statistics from please? @Tyketical Masterstroke

 

Yeah no worries:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...tebyfiveyearagegroupenglandandwales2001to2016

It's from ONS website. On the download I added 'Underlying Cause' to 'Mention' tab for all the age groups up to 15-19. The stats only go from 2001 to 2016. The average for the last 8 years of available data is 56. The last year of available data to have 100 deaths is 2009.

 

I can see why you cite this argument. It is however the one and only anomaly between covid and flu. Overall statistically it's a 95/5% in favour of covid split. Very rarely has flu taken the lives of up to 100 children a year, most generally its around 15. Even at 100 it barely registers as a % of said population (yes I know it's awful to be speaking in numbers terms when we are speaking of fellow human beings). So we have death statistics that mightily outweigh those of flu even with lockdown and social distancing in place. You also need to remember that thousands of people's lives have been saved in our intensive care units, many fit and healthy people in their 40s plus.
I've already pointed out how covid has impacted on me personally too in many different ways. And in all my years working the wards I've never experienced a flu epidemic or pandemic. During May however we had 16 staff test covid positive on just 2 wards in the space of 7 days. Two of these were hospitalised, others were moderately ill and some were asymptomatic: all were fit and healthy.
It's very rare for someone to be off for flu, beer badly mainly
I'm 100% certain that I have the same desire as you to get back to normal. This is why I simply can't fathom why people are trying to minimise covid.
Where would you stand if you was Brazilian? We can pretty much take flu out of the equation there. As a consequence of climate Brazil has a flu death rate of only 1.091 per 100,000 of population. Yet we have seen over 150,000 deaths there from covid in a few short months. There is no covid/flu argument in Brazil.

 

I understand, and I sincerely hope you don't feel that by arguing against lockdown I or anyone else is seeking to belittle or underplay the personal impacts that you in particular have had from this virus. I should have said this weeks ago, but sincere condolences for what's happened to your friends.

The funny thing is I think we're getting to broadly agreeing; that every human life is worth protecting BUT there comes a point in time where the practical, financial and human cost of doing so means it's just impossible - I guess my key point is to point out the inconsistencies of where some people seem to want to draw that line of Covid - I've seen people literally advocating for full and complete lockdown until the disease is completely eradicated - versus where they've been willing to draw it for previous viruses.

 

This is pretty timely:

https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/22/nearly-three-times-people-dying-flu-pneumonia-coronavirus-13021417/

 

Thanks for this reply.
I advocated a short but full lockdown, 6 weeks max. It didn't pan out like this though and we are now suffering the consequence of this. I agree totally that things need to move on and I believe we have actually come a long way. Alas I do feel that until we have a workable vaccine then normality is a little way off yet.
All the best.

 

Another low day going in the right direction.

 

Lies, damned lies and statistics.
We know historically that we rarely see any deaths in our summer months from flu. I would hazard a guess that 99% of these deaths were actually from pneumonia, which is a completely different illness.