No, COVID-19 is not America's Deadliest Pandemic
Don't Buy the Media Attempt to Cover for Their Own Overreaction
Maybe you’ve seen the headlines. The news just seems gleeful to mark the milestone of the U.S. reaching 675,000 Covid deaths which puts us on par with the best for estimate of American deaths during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. For example, CNBC declared that “Covid-19 is Officially America’s Deadliest Pandemic”
Now aside from the obvious innumeracy in comparing a pandemic today to a pandemic a century ago when America had less than one-third the population, there are more important, more pernicious, reasons why this comparison is so flawed.
These comparisons to 1918, and declarations made by the media that Covid-19 is “America’s Worst Pandemic” are really being made not to inform the public, but to provide cover for our government’s terrible response to Covid, and the media’s complicity is driving the societal fear which allows it to continue.
In addition to not accounting for population size, which any honest assessment of disease would do, a proper comparison between Covid-19 and 1918 Influenza would also adjust for age. Covid-19 is predominantly a severe disease for the old and infirm. In developed counties the average age of death with Covid is around 80 years old and the typical Covid patient who dies has multiple comorbidities. By contrast 1918 Influenza was a devastating disease for the young and healthy. When you compute excess deaths, by comparing deaths by age group during the pandemic compared to baseline deaths from the year before the pandemic this contrast becomes unmistakable.
As this chart shows, during 1918, deaths for adolescents and young adults increased by ~150% from the year before! And 1918 also did not spare children which thankfully Covid-19 has. With Covid-19 you see no effect on mortality among children and only moderate increases for other groups. And this chart likely overestimates Covid mortality among young adults, since excess deaths in those age groups haven’t followed Covid’s trajectory and are likely lockdown deaths. You have to get to age 45 before recorded deaths with Covid make up even 10% of all-cause mortality during the pandemic.
You could go on by mentioning that in 1918 we didn’t run ubiquitous PCR tests and count any death with a positive as a death “With Spanish Flu”. Or the fact that this comparison also fails to adjust for time spans. The Spanish Flu first hit in 1918, but it also came around again in 1920 when the US again saw a very harsh flu season, but our estimates only consider the first year of that pandemic. Yet here we are in September of 2021 still rattling off Covid deaths wave after wave since January of 2020 as one big count, in what appears to be an attempt to make the numbers look as big as possible…
So if this comparison is so bunk, why make it at all?, especially without the proper context. I think a recent twitter exchange holds a clue. When CNN Anchor Jake Tapper tweeted today to make a similar declaration he got an immediately reply from Conservative Commentator Jonah Goldberg.
This in turn elicited a response from many persons such as myself who felt the lack of context was blatant media malpractice.
What ensued after was enlightening. Jonah repeatedly doubled down on his original take and in doing so revealed himself to be among the great many media figures who lack context surrounding just how severe this pandemic has been. When challenged as to why one would compare 1918 to what is in reality a moderate to low impact pandemic in Covid-19 Johan had seen enough:
He finds it “grotesque” to call Covid-19 a moderate to low impact pandemic. But here’s the thing, that’s exactly what Covid-19 is, just ask the CDC. (well, at least the CDC prior to 2020…)
You see, prior to the madness of 2020, in the naïve era of 2007, the CDC published Pre-Pandemic Planning Guidance which categorized pandemics and gave guidance for how to best to handle them. In that guidance is graded pandemics of a scale of 1 to 5 based on projected deaths and Infection Fatality Rate. (the charts may say Case Fatality Rate, but by running the numbers it becomes clear they mean IFR not CFR) By these measures 1918 was a true Cat 5, whereas mid-century pandemics in 1957 and 68 were Cat 2’s. The 2009 Swine Flu would have been just a Cat 1. The CDC estimates that Covid-19 has an IRF of around 0.3% to 0.5% which would put it on the upper end of Cat 2, but since we’ve been counting deaths for going on 2 years now the death count now has it sitting squarely in Cat 3 territory. I choose to call a Cat 2/3 or in other words Mild to Moderate…
But media figures like Goldberg just can’t comprehend this. They’ve been stoking the fear and overreaction for too long to realize that while every pandemic can lead to a tragic loss of life much more severe than a typical flu season, they are a natural fact of life on earth which we must cope with. In fact, we’ve paid billions of dollars to scientists and medical experts to study pandemics over decades and to prepare us in ways which would allow us to cope while not ruining society in the process. And this is where our government enabled by our media has truly failed us the most, we lost perspective.
As just one example, the CDC guidance from 2007 includes a table of basic mitigation recommendations based on pandemic severity. Based on a Cat 2/3 pandemic what do you think it says about closing down schools?
4 weeks max. Not close schools for 4 months, not close schools for a year, not close schools for a year than demand all the kids wear masks outside during recess… four weeks... Not to mention no talk of lockdowns, or indefinate business closures, or ubiquious mask mandates of the healthy, or illiberal vaccine mandates. We lost all perspective and our society is still recovering from the damage. Overreacting to Covid-19 and then trying to compare it to the Spanish Flu is like nuking a tropical storm and then trying to compare it to Hurricane Katrina.
The fact is, if Covid-19 had hit us in 1918 it’s quite possible Americans would not have even noticed. The population of adults over 65 years old at the time was extremely low and those fortunate to live that long were on average in much better health than the average senior citizen of today who sees their life extended by modern medicine. By contrast, if the1918 flu had hit us in 2020, given the way we overreacted this past 18 months, I fail to see how our society would have survived at all.
Anyway 0 and 2…