Is this really true? In 2020, we had a near-total economic shut down, isolation, mask wearing, and the Coronavirus still spread rapidly while the flu basically disappeared in 2020.
50% of the population was vaccinated against the flu compared to 0% for covid.
To your point, though, that doesn’t feel like enough to account for how quickly covid spread compared to the flu in 2020.
Exactly. Early estimated reproduction rates had it at least twice as transmissible as flu (Ro 2-4 vs 0.5-2 respectively) even with incredibly limited testing. In fact, I remember estimates of the true number of infections in NYC to be around ten times the official count in the first three months of the pandemic.
The thing with the quoted R0 is that it is of course somewhat theoretical. With a completely naive population and the ability to track initial cases under standard population conditions you’ll get somewhere close to the true figure. Now of course once the pandemic is underway the rate of spread you actually see may not correspond to that initial R0. (for many reasons)
The numbers I’ve seen for the orginal Covid strain suggest it was higher than flu but not by much but of course there was (as has been suggested) already a level of flu vaccination in the population (and more than I would have guessed) plus some degree of flu exposure and natural immunity from many years of previous circulation.
Covid was completely novel so none of that applied. So even if the theoretical infectivity of both were roughly the same circa Feb 2020 it was always going to be the case that Covid would outperform flu and the restrictions taken for covid would suppress flu even more (and from a lower level to start with)
It may also be that a lot ofbthe precautions we took against COVID early on were more effective at flu prevention than COVID prevention (such as obsessively sanitizing things).
Oh hey what’s the story with that? Is sanitizing things pointless in terms of covid?
I like my covid habit of washing my hands really well after returning home from anywhere, and plan to continue. But I’d love to stop washing my hands after getting the mail or opening an Amazon package. Am I in the clear there?
Its my understanding that the current evidence suggests COVID is spread almoat entirely by droplets, and surface transmission is very rare.
But I am no expert and that cpuld have changed.
Flu has basically the same transmission mode as covid. The best preventative measures against covid (avoiding social+physical distancing and masks) worked on flu. As you noted in a later post, surface transmission is rare for covid and also less common for flu.
I’m glad someone brought up flu because it’s another piece of evidence showing how much more transmissible covid is than flu. For example, in spite of increased testing and vaccination for flu, numbers plummeted in the 2020-2021 season. The only major variant of concern that was more transmissible than the original strain was alpha which was about 60% more transmissible. So, even back then, anti-covid measures reduced flu levels lower than we’ve seen before while covid still circulated (most assuredly at lower levels than without measures).
Flu activity was unusually low throughout the 2020-2021 flu season both in the United States and globally, despite high levels of testing. During September 28, 2020–May 22, 2021 in the United States, 1,675 (0.2%) of 818,939 respiratory specimens tested by U.S. clinical laboratories were positive for an influenza virus. The low level of flu activity during this past season contributed to dramatically fewer flu illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths compared with previous flu seasons. For comparison, during the last three seasons before the pandemic, the proportion of respiratory specimens testing positive for influenza peaked between 26.2% and 30.3%. In terms of hospitalizations, the cumulative rate of laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated hospitalizations in the 2020-2021 season was the lowest recorded since this type of data collection began in 2005. For pediatric deaths, CDC received one report of a pediatric flu death in a child during the 2020–2021 flu season. Since flu deaths in children became nationally notifiable in 2004, reported flu deaths in children had previously ranged from a low of 37 (during 2011-2012) to a high of 199 (during 2019-2020).
2020-2021 Flu Season Summary | CDC
The flu issue vis a vis Covid has always puzzled me. Lots o’ people were going on, early on in the pandemic in fact, about how COVID was “no worse than the flu.” A good friend of mine was even saying this in early 2020. None of these people had any expertise, so where TF were they getting this crap? Someone was literally just making this shit up and equally ignorant people were lapping it up.
I think trump was promoting that idea.
The funny thing is that now that we have decent vaccines, covid is only a little worse than flu if you catch it (although enormously more infectious) so it’s no longer a crazy thing to say.
Left unstated in that comment however is the fact that the flu is actually quite bad. Last one I got was probably the most miserable extended experience of my life and I’ve run through a plate glass door while wearing only underwear (I was young 
) and have had multiple kidney stones. Those were worse in the moment, but only just and a flu infection was the misery that kept on giving.
Yeah. I was chatting about it with my doctor, and he said he thinks we’ll all catch it eventually. I said, “I’m sure that’s true, but I’ve had flu half a dozen times (twice in one especially bad year) and i make some non-trivial efforts to avoid catching it.” Flu is horrible. And doesn’t have the same propensity for scary “long flu” side effects.
For the first several weeks after Covid reached the US, I genuinely thought that. My personal yardstick for determining the severity of a pandemic was the Spanish Flu.
And – crucially – the last several alarms had fizzled out. In 2002-2003, SARS caused only a relative handful of deaths. In 2012-2014, MERS was alarming because of the high mortality rate, but it barely even touched the North American continent. We’ve had several outbreaks of Ebola over the past 20 years, but again, none of those did more than barely touch North America. Likewise, there have been several alarms over bird flu and swine flu that ended up going nowhere significant.
So when Covid started, it me some time to realize that this was actually a big deal.
I’m sure it was right-wing outlets like Fox News and One America News Network which were spreading that, even though it turned out all of the hosts and production staff had to get immunized to work there.