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Originally Posted by Icky Thump
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https://www.businessinsider.com/half...ilities-2020-4
If this 1/2 adjustment is applied here, Covid has killed roughly the same # of non-nursing home resident Americans as the flu kills in total every year: 37k.
However, that 37k flu # is a total #, so it would include nursing home residents.
So at the moment, Covid appears to be killing at a rate of 2x the flu. That’s pretty much in line with statistical projections that have been around for a month or so at this point. (Whether this accrues more from unique contagiousness or disease features [likely both] is another conversation.). But it will of course go higher.
What would be interesting would be to see how many people in nursing homes the flu kills every year. Compare that to Covid’s lethality in those settings. Within that 37k total who die of flu, is it only 5% in nursing homes, or is it similar to Covid - 50%? You could tease out a calculation that would show that Covid’s lethality is overstated as the majority of its numbers accrue from a small subset of uniquely weak victims densely contained in facilities where a virus can run wild. You could also discover that the flu deaths per year are 75% located in nursing homes, which would mean Covid’s lethality among non-nursing home residents is the reason for its higher rate of deaths. But I think the former is way more likely than the latter.
