It’s Just the Flu

In the last year, Covid has almost become the new, go to small-talk default subject, like weather. And so it was, that in talking with a work colleague, the person I was speaking with balked at the notion of getting a Covid vaccination. The person said, Covid is, ‘Just the flu’. And went on to brag about never even having a flu shot.

The lack of science literacy (much of it, willful), and poor societal risk assessment is getting a lot of people killed.

So, here are some facts and analysis to chew on:

Covid vs Flu

Influenza (Flu) and COVID-19 are both contagious respiratory illnesses, but they are caused by different viruses. COVID-19 is caused by infection with a new coronavirus (called SARS-CoV-2), and flu is caused by infection with influenza viruses.

“In-hospital mortality for COVID-19 was nearly three-times higher than for seasonal influenza, with an age-standardised mortality ratio of 2·82. In addition, patients with COVID-19 were twice as likely to receive invasive mechanical ventilation, and COVID-19 patients hospitalised in the ICU stayed nearly twice as long as those with influenza.”

R Nought

R0 is the reproductive rate of a contagion. Flu has an R Nought value of ~ 1.3; whereas Covid, has an R Nought value of 2 to 5.7. (And new versions are becoming more contagious. Because the disease is fairly new to medicine, researchers are still tabulating the data required to calculate R0 more or less in real time.) – As a historical comparison, the R0 of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic is estimated to have been between 1.4 and 2.8, according to an article published in BMC Medicine.

What’s more, unlike the flu, for which there is a vaccine, until just recently, everyone in the population is theoretically susceptible to COVID-19. That’s the difference in susceptibility between the flu which affects 8% vs 50% and 80% of the the population could be infected with COVID-19.

Long Haul

The attempts to mitigate the risk and the deaths get most of the headlines, but if people don’t care if they and their loved ones (or, fellow humanity), dies, then maybe perhaps they might be concerned with the potential, crippling ramifications of the disease that is affecting many.

Long COVID (aka Long-Haulers) is estimated to affect 10% to 30% of people who get symptomatic infection. According to new research shared by the medical journal “BMJ Open,” one or more organs are impaired for up to four months in 70% of long haulers.

I take this personally, as I know of a dear friend who took all of the precautions but still got Covid. He was not hospitalized, but now, a year later, he’s still handicapped by the disease with debilitating brain-fog, chronic fatigue and other quality of life crushing symptoms.

Vaccinated

I actually understand that some people are going to look at a disease, and say, ‘death happens’. – I get that instinct. To quote a friend of mine, ‘Over a long enough period of time, life is 100% fatal.‘

But it’s not a matter of unavoidable fate. Just on stats alone, the number of deaths and illnesses are exceptional and global: this isn’t the ‘just’ the flu. (Which would also be a lot worse if it wasn’t for mitigation.) In a perfectly logical world, we could probably erratic Covid. Alas, we don’t operate that perfectly. But we can mitigate the suffering and death if we cooperate more and take what measures we can.

As of this writing, an estimated ~ 575 thousand Americans have died from Covid in the course of about a year. Compare that to 500,193 Americans who were killed in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. – And all of those deaths are after the lock-downs and masks mitigations have reduced the severity. Imagine if those contingencies hadn’t been taken.

And sadly, so much of this anti-science, anti-reason rhetoric is political. I’m quite willing to bet that there is a correlation between the number of people who are feverishly anti-terrorist, gun hoarding, freedom-fry loving, flag waving, canned food hoarding zealots with those who balk at the notion of wearing a mask to protect themselves and their fellow citizens.

Forget basic humanitarian concerns, where are the profound Make America Great Again Patriotic™ concerns? Imagine if 500 MILLION Americans were killed in a year by terrorism. (Between 1995 to 2016, there were 3,393 facilities in the US. [3,005 of those occurred on 9/11]. We’ve seen that number of deaths in the US per day from Covid.)

(Not that we should ever forget the suffering in the rest of the world, because as the world burns, so shall we.)

For my part, I got vaccinated as quickly as I could without cutting line. I did my research before I got it. – With any medicine (and, frankly, anything in life), nothing is 100% risk free but I found that the risks associated with a new vaccine vs Covid were inconsequential. I acknowledge that science and human endeavors are often fraught with unintended consequences, and this could, hypothetically, be the case. But, as in all things in life: we are at our best when we weigh the evidence. And the evidence clearly demonstrates that the probability risk easily falls in the favor of a vaccination.

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

~ Carl Sagan,
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark