Thread by @ScienceVet2

"More people die of the flu every year, you're just fear mongering"

No, more than 140k Americans do NOT die from flu a year. No matter how you calculate them.

2017-18 was the worst recent year and the CALCULATED deaths are still only around 61k tops.

(61k is less than 140k in case you were wondering).

And those are the CALCULATED deaths for a YEAR. That's the number that we come to using the numbers of confirmed deaths, the number of total deaths, and a bunch of math after the season is over.

We figure out how many of those total deaths were almost definitely actually flu. For comparison, the CONFIRMED deaths for flu in an average year is 2-3k. Yes, 2-3 thousand. Again, far less than the 143,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. in six months.

Luckily, we're watching COVID more closely so the deaths aren't AS undercounted. But I can assure you with 100% confidence they're undercounted. There's a great number we follow called "excess deaths" that helps us take into account when things go wonky (like a plague).

Because things like pneumonia and heart attacks actually follow a pretty predictable yearly cycle. Back in April we were already in the 30-40k excess deaths range.

This all leaves aside the fact that even if this DID only kill as many people as the flu (it doesn't), there are some SERIOUSLY BAD side effects to people who survive, many that we're only starting to see, and more we're likely not to see for years.

The flu doesn't screw with the architecture of newly grown capillaries. It doesn't leave people who survive, even ones who don't get on ventilators, with heart and lung damage that we don't know will repair. It doesn't cause clotting resulting in amputations, strokes, DVTs...

It doesn't cause Kawasaki-like syndrome that knocks people flat on their backs for months with strange aches and rashes. It doesn't damage steroidogenesis and spermatogenesis in testicles, potentiall sterilizing young men, and fucking with their hormones for life.

These are ALL things that SARS-CoV-2 DEFINITELY does. And we're finding out that it's doing these things in a lot of the supposedly "mild" cases. Who knows what we will find in the young kids with "mild" cases as they age and hit puberty.

Finally, the flu does not overflow the overflow of the largest public hospitals in the country every year. And right now both TX and FL's largest hospitals are holding people in the ER because their overflow ICUs are overflowing.

They're overflowing so badly now that we're seeing a spike in deaths from other causes (regular heart attacks and heat stroke and such) because there's no place to treat them and no people to do the treating.

The flu doesn't require activation of both Active and Reserve components of the military to support hospitals and set up field hospitals. This is NOT normal, at all.

Do not let anyone tell you this is like the flu in any way. It's not. At best they are wildly wrong.