Jeb, first of all, I gave you a very specific alternative to dealing with the economic challenges for the average American if we really felt we needed to shut things down even until we had a vaccine. But funny, you chose not to address that idea. Why? My guess is it's because deep down inside you know it actually makes sense and destroys the whole idea of the "cure being worse than the disease".
Next, I'm going to provide a link to another article written in the Scientific American by Dr. Jeremy Faust that discusses the fact that the CDC's estimates for flu deaths each year is just that, an estimate that is very possibly off by over 10,000-30,000 each year. Here's the link;
https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...u-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/
What follows are some excerpts from the article:
"In early April, as social distancing measures began to succeed in flattening the curve in some parts of the country, an influential forecasting model revised the number of American deaths from coronavirus that it was projecting by summer downward to 60,400, and some people again began making comparisons to the flu, arguing that, if this will ultimately be no worse than a bad flu season, we should open the country up for business again. (On April 22, the model’s forecast rose to 67,641 deaths.) But these arguments, like the president’s comments, are based on a flawed understanding of how flu deaths are counted, which may leave us with a distorted view of how coronavirus compares with it."
"When reports about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 began circulating earlier this year and questions were being raised about how the illness it causes, COVID-19, compared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.Based on the CDC numbers though, I should have seen many, many more. In 2018, over 46,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. Over 36,500 died in traffic accidents. Nearly 40,000 died from gun violence. I see those deaths all the time. Was I alone in noticing this discrepancy?"
"I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience. The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts."
"To do this, we have to compare counted deaths to counted deaths, not counted deaths to wildly inflated statistical estimates. If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse."
The bottom line is that, according to the CDC, from Feb. 1st to May 31st of 2020 there had only been 6,320 confirmed flu deaths, compared to 84,735 confirmed deaths from Covid. So please, quit comparing the flu to Covid. There's also a vaccine for the flu and the vast majority of those who die from the flu didn't get the **** shot. So again, apples to oranges.
