How do I counter the the flu v COVID-19 argument?

[russian_heel]

I have to admit when someone posts over and over and over again on Facebook that the Flu kills 12,000-61,000 people a year and this COVID-19 thing is overblown by the media and we are all needlessly panicking, I have trouble disagreeing with those numbers. Often the argument is coupled with the “media is trying to discredit Trump” charge which makes my back bristle even more.

Here are the arguments I have made so far, is there a better one?

-The infection rate appears to be higher
-So far the death rate is higher
-Its possible way more than 40,000 people will die

I have a feeling there is a better argument out there that these people are missing. Is there one?

[Slash1972]

“Why would the President declare a National Emergency if this is just the media trying to discredit him?”

[Hampshire]

I heard an infectious disease doc on the radio this morning saying the flu usually kills about 1 in 1000 while COVID-19 is more like 1 in 50.

[monstro]

@Slash1972

“Why would the President declare a National Emergency if this is just the media trying to discredit him?”

I have been able to get people thinking by asking them why they think China and Italy have chosen to cripple their own economies and imprison their own people. What insane leader would go to such extremes just to discredit Trump? It makes no sense.

Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk

[JohnT]

@russian_heel

I have to admit when someone posts over and over and over again on Facebook that the Flu kills 12,000-61,000 people a year and this COVID-19 thing is overblown by the media and we are all needlessly panicking, I have trouble disagreeing with those numbers. Often the argument is coupled with the “media is trying to discredit Trump” charge which makes my back bristle even more.

Here are the arguments I have made so far, is there a better one?

-The infection rate appears to be higher
-So far the death rate is higher
-Its possible way more than 40,000 people will die

I have a feeling there is a better argument out there that these people are missing. Is there one?

“When was the last time you saw multiple first-world countries shut their borders because of ‘the flu’?”

[kk_fusion]

@JohnT

“When was the last time you saw multiple first-world countries shut their borders because of ‘the flu’?”

This sounds circular. We shut down our borders because of the severity of the disease and the reason why it’s severe is that we have shut down our borders.

[Velocity]

I was about to say what** KK Fusion** just said - any argument of “The fact that people and nations are reacting so strongly proves that it’s serious” smacks of circular logic. People who say “The flu kills more” are asking ***why ***it is necessary for society and governments to react so strongly, and to reply “Because they are reacting strongly” provides no useful response reply at all.

[JohnT]

Guys, we’re not talking about good SDMB debates, but things to say to a group of Facebook righties. Think they’re going to call out “circular logic!”?

[asahi]

@russian_heel

I have to admit when someone posts over and over and over again on Facebook that the Flu kills 12,000-61,000 people a year and this COVID-19 thing is overblown by the media and we are all needlessly panicking, I have trouble disagreeing with those numbers. Often the argument is coupled with the “media is trying to discredit Trump” charge which makes my back bristle even more.

Here are the arguments I have made so far, is there a better one?

-The infection rate appears to be higher
-So far the death rate is higher
-Its possible way more than 40,000 people will die

I have a feeling there is a better argument out there that these people are missing. Is there one?

There are more influenza disease vectors, mainly because flu has had a pretty big head start.

There is no immunity to COVID-19. No vaccine and no natural antibodies to it unless you actually get it. You might win the genetic lottery and have an immmune system that thwarts it or fights it and wins that fight early, but the infection rate is high in part because it’s a new virus. It’s also one that allows people to shed virus before noticeable symptoms appear.

[XT]

@russian_heel

I have to admit when someone posts over and over and over again on Facebook that the Flu kills 12,000-61,000 people a year and this COVID-19 thing is overblown by the media and we are all needlessly panicking, I have trouble disagreeing with those numbers. Often the argument is coupled with the “media is trying to discredit Trump” charge which makes my back bristle even more.

Here are the arguments I have made so far, is there a better one?

-The infection rate appears to be higher
-So far the death rate is higher
-Its possible way more than 40,000 people will die

I have a feeling there is a better argument out there that these people are missing. Is there one?

Well, it’s all about relative risk. It is true that the seasonal flu kills a hell of a lot of people, and people tend to hand wave it away thinking it’s no big deal. The real flaw in the argument is that the flu IS deadly, and people should take it much more seriously than they do. They should get their seasonal flu shots (and I’ve heard that getting a flu shot might help to mitigate some of the Covid-19 virus, or at least make the case if you get it less bad). But that brings up something…we don’t HAVE a vaccine for this thing. Yet. We also have no idea how it might mutate now that it’s out in the wild, so to speak. That, alone, should make people pay attention.

The arguments you are giving seem right. The infectious rate is higher with Covid-19. In some respects it’s a lot more communicable. It also does have a higher absolute mortality rate, though it targets similar demographic groups. That said, flu CAN be MUCH higher as well and can target different demographic groups depending on the strain.

As to the last, the thing is, no one knows. For one thing, we don’t know how many people have actually died in China…or, really, how many have it. We have the CCPs numbers on that, and, frankly, I wouldn’t trust them. At all. But no one really knows how wide spread this thing is, or how out of control it will be. I seriously doubt that in the US if more people will die from Covid-19 than a bad outbreak of the flu, but we don’t really know at this point as we have lost containment and are behind the curve on testing. That said, major steps are being taken by the government, especially local government, to mitigate the spread. My state is one of those who have already canceled school for 3-4 week and state employees who are non-essential have been put on a telecommuting policy, major public gatherings have been canceled, etc etc. This is definitely going to mitigate the spread, somewhat…but since we don’t know how pervasive it is right now there is no way to tell how bad it will be. Then you have the fact that we are likely to have a slowdown in the next few months, only to have it sweep back in come fall.

So, how do you counter the arguments in your OP? With the truth. I’d also toss in that our President is an idiot who has no clue what he’s talking about, and often says contradictory things, both contradicting his own administration, officials, experts and everyone else, but also himself.

[Velocity]

@JohnT

Guys, we’re not talking about good SDMB debates, but things to say to a group of Facebook righties. Think they’re going to call out “circular logic!”?

It’s not just Facebook righties though. There are a substantial number of lefties who also argue “flu kills more.”
(The ideal argument would probably be to point out that the reason Covid-19 hasn’t killed as many as flu is that it hasn’t infected as many as flu yet. If it had the same number of infected, it would have a higher death toll.)

[asahi]

@Hampshire

I heard an infectious disease doc on the radio this morning saying the flu usually kills about 1 in 1000 while COVID-19 is more like 1 in 50.

It’s probably more like 1 in 100 across the general population, but for some people, it could be 1 in 50 or even 1 in 10. If you’re living in a country that offers reliable access to quality modern healthcare and one that also tests instantly and on a large scale, your chances of survival are at least 1 in 100 if you’re under the age of 50 and without underlying health concerns, and it’s possible your odds could be even better than that.

If, on the other hand, you’re living in a country without widespread testing, with a government that seems to be having a hard time reckoning with people about the seriousness of the disease, and has a healthcare system that’s a complicated patchwork that doesn’t offer affordable access to quality healthcare, then you’re living in a situation that’s a ticking time bomb.

Guess which country I’m talking about?

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Hampshire

I heard an infectious disease doc on the radio this morning saying the flu usually kills about 1 in 1000 while COVID-19 is more like 1 in 50.

It’s more like 1 in 200 in places like Korea with better screening.

[GIGObuster]

@Damuri_Ajashi

It’s more like 1 in 200 in places like Korea with better screening.

Korea shows why there is a need to test more; however, the death rate I have seen reported is still higher than the flu.

What ‘wonderful laboratory’ South Korea can teach world about Covid-19

Yet in South Korea, where the country’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday reported 6,088 cases and 40 deaths, the mortality rate appears to be hovering around 0.65 per cent.

While this is still several times more lethal than seasonal influenza, which kills about 0.1 per cent of the people it infects – 30,000-40,000 people in the US alone each year – South Korea’s rate is far lower than that seen elsewhere.

And then there are doubts about that low (still higher than the flu) death rate. It may be higher:

South Korea’s Fatality Rate of COVID-19 Is Not A “More Accurate” Estimate

Others have claimed that South Korea’s lower fatality rate is a result of good surveillance detecting mild cases. I offered the alternative explanation that South Korea’s confirmed cases are more recent, thus patients have not reached an outcome yet.

Why does Italy have a higher case-fatality rate of 3.8% then?

It is true that in general, proactive testing plays a part in lower fatality rates. It seems like Italy is not detecting the true number of cases, thus inflating the fatality rate.

However, I still think it is an error to say that proactive testing in South Korea has revealed the “true” fatality rate. For the moment, it has lowered the fatality rate, as it uncovered the cases around the Shincheonji super-spreader event, which would have otherwise been hidden by their secretive members. However, we don’t know if these cases are truly mild, or if these cases will be more severe but have simply not reached their outcomes yet.

We will get a better idea in the coming days.

On a related note, the reported sampling time to get a reading on Corona in Korea is about 10 minutes, with results available in a few days. We may eventually get perhaps enough test kits available in the US… in the next or two weeks.

[Ravenman]

Worst-Case Estimates for U.S. Coronavirus Deaths (Published 2020)

Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and epidemic experts from universities around the world conferred last month about what might happen if the new coronavirus gained a foothold in the United States. How many people might die? How many would be infected and need hospitalization? …

Between 160 million and 214 million people in the U.S. could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to one projection… As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die…

Even severe flu seasons stress the nation’s hospitals to the point of setting up tents in parking lots and keeping people for days in emergency rooms. Coronavirus is likely to cause five to 10 times that burden of disease, said Dr. James Lawler, an infectious diseases specialist and public health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

All of this may not come to pass, if people start changing their behavior, like washing hands, staying away from crowds, and so on.

But if this is Facebook, maybe the best response is: “Where shall I send the flowers when your elderly friends/family are buried?”

[HMS_Irruncible]

A good question would be… why is Trump cancelling all his rallies due to Covid-19? Is it because he’s more afraid of the press than he admits, or is it because he’s more afraid of the virus than he admits?

Look at what they do, not what they say. I don’t see any groups of boomer Trump supporters staging large demonstrations to show they’re not afraid of the virus.

[robby]

@russian_heel

…I have a feeling there is a better argument out there that these people are missing. Is there one?

Two reasons:
[ul]
[li]The mortality rate for COVID-19 is at least an order of magnitude greater than that of influenza.[/li][li]The number of cases of COVID-19 are increasing exponentially.[/li][/ul]
Note that “exponentially” is not a synonym for “a lot.” It’s a mathematical term.

When a danger is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t

There’s an old brain teaser that goes like this: You have a pond of a certain size, and upon that pond, a single lilypad. This particular species of lily pad reproduces once a day, so that on day two, you have two lily pads. On day three, you have four, and so on.

Now the teaser. “If it takes the lily pads 48 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take for the pond to be covered halfway?”

The answer is 47 days. Moreover, at day 40, you’ll barely know the lily pads are there.

The problem isn’t the current number of cases. It’s how many cases we will have in a few weeks or months.

More detail here:
Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

@Velocity

(The ideal argument would probably be to point out that the reason Covid-19 hasn’t killed as many as flu is that it hasn’t infected as many as flu yet. If it had the same number of infected, it would have a higher death toll.)

The true mortality rate of Covid-19 is not known.

And part of the issue in this regard seems to be that there are many people who contract the virus in a very mild or asymptomatic form. Many of these people don’t get tested. (People point to the fact that places which have tested more aggressively have lower mortality rates as evidence of the efficacy of testing, but ISTM more likely that the bigger factor is that testing more aggressively puts a lot of mild/asymptomatic cases into the denominator, which brings down the rate.)

So it seems at least theoretically possible that the mortality rate for infected people is somewhere in the same range as the flu, but that a lot more people are infected with Covid-19 than we assume. As a practical matter, the implication of this is that even if drastic measures were not taken, that it might not be more harmful than the flu. Assuming, that is, that the natural spread of the disease is also comparable to flu (it would appear that the percentage of people who contact flu viruses each year - even those who are not immunized - is significantly less than 100%, so it makes sense to assume that the same might apply to Covid-19).

The point of all this is not to argue that any of the above is true, and certainly not to argue against any particular public health measure (let alone to promote “media is trying to discredit Trump” nonsense). Rather, that very little is known about the virus at this point, and ISTM that many possibilities are hard to rule out or refute.

[Ravenman]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

The point of all this is not to argue that any of the above is true, and certainly not to argue against any particular public health measure (let alone to promote “media is trying to discredit Trump” nonsense). Rather, that very little is known about the virus at this point, and ISTM that many possibilities are hard to rule out or refute.

Except that we can listen to actual experts who have studied the matter instead of just hypothesizing.

[Wesley_Clark]

Here is my impression on why people should take it more seriously and not compare it to the flu.

The flu kills about 0.1% of people who get it. COVID-19 kills closer to 2-4%, making it 20-40 times more deadly.

COVID-19 is more contagious. The flu has an R0 of about 1.3, meaning for ever 1 person who gets it, they infect 1.3 new people (so if 3 people have the flu, then infect 4 more). Because of this, about 10% of America gets the flu each year (around 30 million people). COVID-19 has an R0 of closer to 2-3, and there are predicts that anywhere from 20-70% of Americans will catch the virus before this is all said and done.

If you do the math, a virus that infects 10% of people and kills 0.1% of them can’t even begin to compare with a virus that infects 20-70% of people and kills 2-4% of them.

Granted, hopefully the actual death rate is lower. It may be as low as 0.5% when you factor in all the people who have mild symptoms and aren’t tested, but since its more contagious even the best case scenario means that it’ll kill at least 25x more people than the flu. Worst case scenario is it could kill well over 250 times more people than the flu.

Also there is another massive issue with the virus. It will overload hospitals, which could raise the death rates for both COVID-19 patients and people who need medical care for issues unrelated to the virus but can’t get it because all the hospital beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients.

For every 100 patients who get it I think about ~10% end up in the hospital. Around 5% end up on ventilators.

America only has 925k hospital beds total and 160k ventilators total. And most of those are already being used up for patients with other illnesses (we don’t have 925k empty hospital beds and 160k ventilators that aren’t being used, we have 925k and 160k total of each, the vast majority of which are currently being used for other sick patients).

If 20 million people have COVID at the same time, that means around 2 million people need hospital beds and 1 million people need ventilators. They won’t be able to get the ventilators, which means the death rate for the virus will go up.

Not only that, but what happens to all the people with emergency medical issues unrelated to COVID-19? You still have car accidents, strokes, heart attacks, accidents at work, etc. People will have these, go to the hospital but all the doctors, nurses, hospital beds and ventilators will be occupied by COVID-19 patients. People won’t be able to get the care they need for emergency medical issues unrelated to COVID-19.

So due to an overload of the hospitals, death rates from COVID-19 and death rates from other illnesses (strokes, accidents, heart attacks, etc) could also go up due to lack of proper medical care.

Among the elderly, the death rate is closer to 10%. If the virus infects a large enough share of the public (50-100%, that means 5-10% of the elderly will die. Globally, I assume the worst case scenario is about ~50 million deaths.

Also we have a vaccine for the flu, there is no COVID vaccine yet. There are also approved meds to help control the flu. THere are no meds to control COVID yet. There are experiments with protease inhibitors to control it, but there may not be a big enough supply of them yet.

A lot of people who say we are overreacting seem to think this is the peak of the illness. This isn’t the peak of the illness. If the Illness takes a year to run its course, we are basically on month 2. It’ll likely be a whole lot worse in summer.

TL;DR

[ul]
[li]COVID-19 is anywhere from 5-50x more deadly than the flu in patients who get it[/li]
[li]COVID-19 is more contagious than the flu, while the flu infects about 10% of Americans each year, COVID-19 may infect 20-70% of Americans. No idea what the rate could be overseas but I assume similar. [/li]
[li]We have a flu vaccine, we don’t have a COVID-19 vaccine[/li]
[li]We have pharmaceutical therapies for the flu, we have no therapies for COVID-19 yet other than experimental ones[/li]
[li]COVID-19 will overwhelm hospitals, meaning lots of people who need care for COVID-19 or other diseases will not be able to get the care they need[/li]
[li]COVID-19 will cause a lot of economic damage that will take years to recover from. The flu does not.[/li][/ul]