I know I'm getting into your archives with this article, but THANK YOU for pointing out the 2018 study that relates flu to heart attacks. This is a huge data point that goes unnoticed quite often. It makes me want to do what I can to avoid the flu completely!
He is right that comparing deaths is apples to oranges. Not many people get flu as a cause of death. The methodology is here - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm. It looks at both positive flu tests at a sampling of hospital and flu like symptoms. My point was that if you only look at respiratory disease, you miss a lot of other issues associated with the immune response to flu. I suspect that will be worse with Covid, at least for a while. Thanks for reading.
I know I'm getting into your archives with this article, but THANK YOU for pointing out the 2018 study that relates flu to heart attacks. This is a huge data point that goes unnoticed quite often. It makes me want to do what I can to avoid the flu completely!
https://mattcook.substack.com/p/this-natural-mucolytic-can-reduce
Interesting that you look at the fact that flu deaths are estimated by a model as a reason to think they are underestimated; this reminds of https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/, which argues that since flu deaths come from models, they are overestimated (vs more rigorously counted covid deaths).
I don't know which is right, but curious what your take on that would be.
He is right that comparing deaths is apples to oranges. Not many people get flu as a cause of death. The methodology is here - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm. It looks at both positive flu tests at a sampling of hospital and flu like symptoms. My point was that if you only look at respiratory disease, you miss a lot of other issues associated with the immune response to flu. I suspect that will be worse with Covid, at least for a while. Thanks for reading.