“Deaths from ordinary flu”

In recent days there have been data and graphs “extra mortality” (compared to the average for recent years or predicted based on past years) from COVID-19, which very clearly show that the coronavirus is not a “normal flu”, and other data about it a lot. (Including, a disease, from which an unusually high death rate of health workers — in Russia, for example, almost 10% of all deaths.) No one except hardcore deniers, whom nothing can convince of the danger of the disease seems to have no doubt.

However, a month ago everyone was filled with conversations about what is “normal flu”, which was accompanied with figures about how many supposedly people die per year from ordinary flu. And compared to this figures the coronavirus is starting to look scary. View column in Scientific American, the most important and oldest popular science publication in the world. Briefly: a comparison of the number of deaths from coronavirus (mostly diagnosed in the hospital) and died in the year of the “common flu” (a residual category, as measured by rare hospital cases and includes, among other things, all “pneumonia”) is comparing apples with oranges. If the flu was considered as a coronavirus, it would be ten times fewer deaths per year. And the comparison would not have rolled.

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