re: Shocking News: The data used to initiate lockdowns was bogus

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The last quote is if everyone in the country got it at the 0.1% rate they should have been using. It explains that.

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Right, except that doesn’t make any sense in the context of the argument that article is making. The entire premise of the article is that Congress was incorrectly told that COVID would kill 10x as many as the flu. That would mean roughly 300-400k deaths in a year. Right now we are on track for just shy of 300k over 12 months. So while that estimate looks high, it’s not off by a factor of 10.

The flu doesn’t infect 100% of the population in a given year, so I’m not sure where the assumption that 100% of the population would catch COVID came into play. If it came from congressional testimony, then that’s the real story (not IFR vs. CFR). If it came from this Russia Today article, then that’s a pretty good sign that the article is BS.

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What’s happening with Covid vs Flu deaths in reality is explained easily by how we count each. Covid illness/death has been hyper sensitive to the point where death certificates are scrutinized and cases are tallied daily. Flu illness/death has been greatly ignored to the point we have to make rough estimates for both. We don’t know how many people get the flu every year much less even close to an exact number of anyone who dies with the flu. It’s a CDC best guess where the rules are must stricter in calling a death of flu vs Covid.

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I posted this in a previous thread but I think it’s worth repeating:

Here are recent CDC estimates for flu deaths:
2014-2015: 44,000 to 64,000 (estimate 51,000)
2015-2016: 17,000 to 35,000 (estimate 23,000)
2016-2017: 29,000 to 61,000 (estimate 38,000)
2017-2018: 46,000 to 95,000 (estimate 61,000)
2018-2019: 26,339 to 52,664 (estimate 34,157)
2019-2020: 24,000 to 62,000 (no estimate available yet from what I can tell)

CDC estimates flu deaths by extrapolating from a flu surveillance network that covers ~8.5% of the population and then applying fudge factors to account for variables like testing frequency. Meaning the number of lab-confirmed influenza deaths reported to CDC in a given year is at most about 8.5% of their estimates.

That means that for the 2017-2018 season, when CDC estimated 61,000 flu deaths, they likely used 5,000 or less actual lab-confirmed deaths (which, by the way, would have included the same comorbidities you see in the COVID data) to develop this estimate. If they reported COVID deaths the same way, people would lose their shite.