What we Mean when we say CoVid-2019 is Like the Flu
As you read this article I would like you to consider a few things about me as the source of this information.
- If you look at the top of this website you will see it is called The Survival Podcast. If you are new around here this is a 12 year old two time winner of the “Podcast of the Year Award” with almost a quarter million daily listeners. I teach and have taught preparedness for over a decade now. If I was out for pure self interest, the best thing for me right now would be to hype this crisis for personal gain as most of my contemporaries are doing. Just consider I gain nothing and likely at least short term hurt myself by taking the calm and rational approach to this. I could be selling “fear and gear” like everyone else, instead I have been presenting pragmatic facts again for over a decade.
~ - I am not a doctor, I am not a virologist, I am not a scientist nor am I an epidemiologist. I also don’t claim any such credentials. I am simply pointing to simple, verifiable and sourced facts. In fact 90% of what I am about to tell you the media is actually saying, they are simply sandwiching it between wall to wall fear mongering.
~ - What you are about to read is based on sourced facts and logical extrapolations there of. None of it is meant to say there is absolutely nothing to worry about or to not take sensible precautions. As I teach and have taught basic preparedness for over a decade I don’t feel the need to shout at my main audience about stocking up, etc. My audience is stocked, it is exactly why they re not currently contributing to the hording and shortages it causes. Every American should be taught that basic preparedness is a virtue, if that was done, there would be a lot less fear and panic at the present time.
So here we go, strap and get ready to hear what many seem to be in complete denial of.
Right now there seems to be a meme in place that people are claiming that CoVid-2019 is “just like” the flu. This is a false meme, a comparison does not by proxy mean an equivalency. When people claim that some of us are saying “CoVid is no worse than the flu” they are leaving out the rest of the statement. The actual claim is “CoVid is no worse than the flu for most people that get it.” That word most is a very important word to consider here.
The two are not the same and I feel 99% of those making the comparison are aware of that. The point is simply, quit freaking the eff out, take basic precautions and go on with your life because the reality is there is nothing more that you can do. Breathlessly watching four hours of footage of cruise ship coming into dock, won’t help you in the slightest. Nor will hearing for the 100th time from an expert telling you to wash your hands and sneeze into your sleeve. Except for updates on numbers the media could do 15 minutes of content, run it on a loop and most people would not even notice right now, it is that repetitive. Of course this leads to a compulsive need to hype the very small amount of new data they actually get in a week long cycle.
The real point we are making in our comparison to flu is, if flu was reported the way the media (both main stream and alternative) are reporting CoVid people would be committing suicide by now.
There is also a fundamental set of facts going on here that some people desperately seem to wish to remain in denial of. This is done to the extent that I must conclude many actually want to be afraid, they want to believe the worst. It is as if a huge portion of America is watching something akin to a reality horror show. Think Jersey Shore meets Contagion. Many Americans seem to not want anyone to show them the cameras, directors and producers nor the actors getting their hair and make up done. I am not saying it is all fake, I am saying the perspective is skewed.
Here are the facts you have to ignore to keep the hysteria high….
1. Fact One – new viruses always infect the people most susceptible to them first, making the death rate and hospital rate inflated at the onset of any outbreak. This also makes the contagion rate appear higher than it is in reality.
2. Fact Two – These viruses almost always end up mutating to less lethal and less aggressive, not the other way around. This has already happened with CoVid-2019, though the media first reported it the other way around that it became “more aggressive and deadly”. As soon as that was corrected the media went back to it “could mutate” ignoring that it already did. Isn’t that odd?
In fact if you google “covid-19 has mutated” you will be greeted by a stack of articles saying it is now more lethal, this is in direct conflict with the facts. In China 70% of cases are the more aggressive strain and 30% are the less aggressive, simply because the more aggressive one came FIRST. I figured this out from the base data about 5 minutes after the first false claims came out. They left all the hysterical articles up, no one corrected them, the media again went right back to it could mutate ignoring that it already had. Use your own brain here to figure out why.
3. Fact Three – the death and hospitalization rate is hugely skewed due to the massive number of asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic cases. In other words a lot more people have it then have tested positive for it so the percentages of dead and seriously ill look higher then they are.
Bluntly you know when someone is dead, because they are well, dead. You also know when someone is in a hospital or on a ventilator at a hospital. You don’t know that they have CoVid if they sit home, eat soup, thought they had the flu and go on with life. The media, even the main stream media, occasionally briefly acknowledges this, then immediately returns to concerned experts, scary graphs and reporting every single case of CoVid-2019 they can find or surmise.
Again if the flu or any of a few dozen other diseases were reported like this people would be jumping out of windows due to stress by now.
4. Fact Four – The place with the highest sample size is South Korea where they developed a five minute test you can get in a drive though like you went to McDonald’s for a burger. (source data here https://lat.ms/2Q9rfJw ) Due to that in just two weeks they tested 150,000 people. The death rate dropped with that from numbers hyped as high as 3-15% to well, .6 percent. That is point 6 percent as in 6/10th of one percent to be totally clear on this. Note that even that number is subject to further mitigation by the three previous facts above. They don’t go away just due to this level of testing. The fact is even with South Korea’s fast action many cases will still go undetected as they are asymptomatic or so mild people just stay home but never get tested.
5. Fact Five – The reporting is being skewed to make it look worse than it is, mostly because the media hypes everything. The second reason though is that CoVid-2019 it is an actual problem and hype creates compliance. Folks they call what the TV does, “programming” for a reason. For instance in the flu season so far for the 2019-2020 fall-winter season, AT LEAST 132 people a day died of the flu, because the number this year is already at least 20,000 source CDC (I didn’t pull it out of my ass, here is the link to the CDC data, http://bit.ly/3cPAKaj ) This does not mean CoVid is the same as flu or not worse for you if you get it. What it means is that CoVid is being reported in an irrational manner compared to flu. Imagine if they came on television and radio 25 times a day and said “again today over 100 Americans died of this years flu strain”. And if this had been going on for months.
6. Fact Six – (Note – I should really call #6 an educated guess not a fact, it is the one I am most likely to be potentially wrong about here) – The claim we keep hearing that it is more contagious than the flu seems to be nonsense at least according to some people. One example here http://bit.ly/2QaWDHD. Why? Well there are more new cases of the flu DAILY than the total cumulative number of CoVid cases since it started months ago. Most experts agree that flu is so contagious that quarantine is largely ineffective. Again this is not a vague claim the National Institute of Health says this here http://bit.ly/2TGhvs6
Also while flu is a little mitigated in areas under enhanced control for CoVid-2019 it is still pretty high. While in those same areas CoVid has been largely held back relatively speaking. Meaning while quarantine is not 100% effective with CoVid it seems more effective than it is for influenza. I may not be a doctor, but I do have a propensity for logic. The facts here are in direct conflict with the claimed theory of infection rate. I am not saying CoVid is not highly infectious just that it appears to be at least slightly less so then the flu, while the exact opposite is being claimed.
*Note – Item six was modified form the original published version due to a valid point made by Nick From Mongolia in the comments below. The modifications were the statement in parenthesis and the link to the NY Post Article. This is noted for full disclosure and journalistic integrity.
7. Fact Seven – Farr’s law is already playing out. Farr’s law was first formulated in 1840 by William Farr, one of the founders of modern epidemiology. It has since been ignored in every epidemic hysteria since, the law states that epidemics tend to rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern or bell-shaped curve. AIDS, SARS, Ebola — they all followed that pattern. So does seasonal flu each year.
See the graph below, it shows the new cases vs. cumulative cases. Source is the CDC you can find it here http://bit.ly/2TFhghc While it appears that cases are now again on the rise when you factor in the fact that testing is now going on, it shows a flattening. Again South Korea tested 150,000 people in two weeks more than the rest of the world tested in a month. We are already heading to the back side of the Farr’s law bell curve which is being driven by the coming of spring and warmer wetter temperatures. Yet another way CoVid is like but not just like the flu.
Again I know new cases appear to rise but due to extensive testing we now know of literally thousands of cases that other wise would go undiagnosed. No one actually denies this fact. Again in moments of honesty even the TV experts are saying this. To see the graphic below you will need to drill down to current cases at the CDC site, again which is here http://bit.ly/2TFhghc. Cumulative is always going to grow and fairly rapidly, it is another thing media focuses on exclusively because it is well, scarier.
This is why insurance companies just agreed to cover 100% of CoVid costs with no deductible, they know we are going into decline already and it won’t cost them much. (This is another fact you can confirm, here you go http://bit.ly/2vcqE2i ) As most American’s know insurance companies use every trick they can to deny a claim, they just wrote a very public blank check on CoVid. Draw your own conclusions from that. Do you really think if 20,000 Americans were going to be in ICUs and on respirators tomorrow Aetna, Cigna, etc would write a blank check for the bill?
In the end, most people (note most, not all) that compare CoVid-2019 to Influenza are saying it is more like flu than any other illness we can compare it to. Like the flu does not mean the same as the flu, you should have learned that in say 3rd grade grammar.
The point is stop freaking out, get the actual facts and take the precautions you are directed to take. Otherwise go on with life, stop hording toilet paper and bottled water. Realize you have an unlimited supply of water from your sink by the way and that a few packs of TP lasts a long time.
That is all, nothing more. The fact that pointing this all out triggers people into a hysterical response shows that the over hype and misreporting is working exactly as it is intended to. CoVid is not nothing but it is far less of a threat then current hysteria would lead you to believe. In fact your odds of dying of any accidental death vs. CoVid in the next four days, are fundamentally equal.
That does not mean to ignore the actual threat, just turn the TV off a few hours a day, the stress it is applying to the mental health of the American people right now likely exceeds the danger of CoVid-2019. It is also the key factor driving the economic consequences and supply shortages. None of which helps anyone, well except the people profiting from it or using it to further an agenda.
* Note – Before attacking this article by attacking my site or myself as the source, please look up what an ad hominem fallacy is. Thank you. If you wish to dispute my claims in this article I invite you to do so. Before doing so please consult the diagram bellow. This is something we should be teaching along with basic preparedness in this country. Hence any comments on this article that fall below the threshold of counterargument will be ignored and not responded to.
http://infomullet.com/2020/03/10/infomullet-covid-curiosity-is-a-country-facing-outbreak-or-containment/
This is an fairly comprehensive Data analysis on the corvid I think you will find interesting.
Link didn’t work for me.
Never mind I fixed it for you.
Great resource by the way.
@Jack – today’s post is fantastic. Keep up the good work!
Hey, stop being rational… The internet is no place for that nonsense. lol
Let’s talk about how this is a good thing.
First, many companies are evaluating their “work from home” policies, creating those opportunities where they don’t already exist, etc. It doesn’t matter if it’s a plague or just flu season, if people stop coming to work out of fear, that impacts the bottom line. This panic has made that very clear and companies are now seriously looking at how to make accommodations.
This is good. It pays dividends long after the panic subsides. Imagine a year from now, this has blown over. But Bob in the office gets the flu. He could take a few sick days from his PTO and leave the office in a bind for a week, wasting his time-off and the company is falling behind due to his absence. He could come in anyway and infect half the office, so he saves his time off, but causes more damage. Or he works from home when sick, where he’s more comfortable, doesn’t infect anyone, gets paid normally, the office doesn’t fall behind in work or have to offer overtime to others to pick up the slack, and Bob gets to use his time off for when he feels good and can enjoy a relaxing vacation instead of saving half his PTO every year on the off chance he might get sick and need it.
Another mitigating measure companies are taking… the four day work week. People work four 10-hour days instead of five 8-hour days. This reduces everyone’s exposure to everyone else by ~20%. You and hypothetical co-worker Mike work different days, and there is one fewer day per week your shifts overlap where you would be exposed to each other, reducing the odds of transmission of a disease between you significantly. In companies with a lot of employees, this has an appreciable effect. Additionally, if someone does get sick, there is now a 3/7 chance instead of a 2/7 chance that it occurs on their day off, resulting in fewer call-ins for illness and a secondary reduction in transmissability averages.
There are plug-ins for scheduling software for larger companies that track viral spread and adjust dynamically to mitigate it. If you call in sick (without knowing the reason, it works statistically), employee schedules can be rearranged to isolate those who have been exposed to you. Say you work at a fast food chain. If you call in sick, your next shift is scheduled for periods when there is less customer traffic, and the people you’ve worked with prior to calling in sick are in a higher risk pool for becoming ill themselves, and while they show no symptoms, you have someone scheduled on-call to cover a shift in anticipation of one of them calling out in a few days so you don’t end up short-handed. It’s an ethically gray area, legally as well, but it does reduce impact on business and the public at large. You could say it serves the greater good, but as you know innocent people can circumstantially end up on the wrong side of the greater good and get fucked. And this is all machine-learning driven so good luck getting anyone to explain the justifications used by the algorithm. But with a large enough pool of data, the best overall action can be derived from complex patterns. For better or worse, companies are much more aware of this today than they were three months ago.
Telemedicine is finally starting to take off in the US. This is good, it lowers healthcare costs and is much more convenient. It also reduces exposure to disease. If you’re not sick, the best way to get sick is sitting in a clinic waiting room for an hour surrounded by sick people while waiting for a doctor to talk to you about your non-contagious skin issue or toenail fungus or imagined restless leg syndrome, lol. A lot of doctors visits (especially consultations) can be done in a video conference. Obviously you still need to go in for blood work, Imaging etc, but a significant amount of visits can be reduced which is good for everyone.
These things – Telemedicine, telecommuting, dynamic scheduling and the four-day work week are in most cases much more efficient. Most industry has been trending to them slowly over the last 15 years, but they are a radical change for businesses and people in general. It’s dismissed as crazy because it’s different than what people are used to. But situations like this send people scrambling for any solutions they can find. Now they’re receptive to alternatives and willing to reconsider their preconceived notions.
It’s like telling a neighbor you’re a prepper. In their mind, you’re a crazy guy with a horde of guns and MREs waiting for the illuminati’s black helicopters, lol. Their minds are set on the preconception, however wrong it is. But when the power goes out for a week and they look in your window to see all the lights on… Now you’re not crazy, you’re smart. We’re seeing the same shift in perspective on a societal level, especially in business. First, we need to get past the panic stage, then consider what options we have to mitigate this or potential future outbreaks. Then of those solutions available to us, can any of them be integrated into what we do so they also pay dividends in other areas and improve productivity and efficiency, increase revenue or reduce expenses? Wherever the answer is “Yes” advancement is made.
This is exactly what you teach. Holistic strategies, turning problems into solutions, etc. And it’s happening on a large scale, all on it’s own. That’s awesome. The panic response does get all the attention, but there are more pragmatic responses (perhaps born of panic) that are still very useful.
I think these topics would make for an awesome non-CoVid-19 show, lol. Just how business and society are changing, and how people are preparing for those changes. A guest-show to explain telemedicine for example could be huge, especially with so many rural listeners. Telecommuting for work… that touches on economics and personal freedom, as well as general preparedness. Many of us remember the early days when you recorded on your commute to work. Now you work at home, you can attest to the change that makes on lifestyle. The four-day work week and dynamic scheduling play into topics like workplace automation, which has been a major concern of this audience. For example, my company is moving to only remote work (why have the overhead of an office if it just hosts people who work on computers?). That also means we’re not tied to geography, we can hire anyone from anywhere in the world. So employees are competing globally in the job market. But at the same time, you can be hired by millions of companies offering good wages, not just the businesses in your local area. That’s a huge fundamental change to job markets happening on a large scale right now. Most people will be touched by this change in the near future if they haven’t been already. In some cases it will be good, for others it will be bad, but it is happening now and will continue to do so.
Just throwing that out there. Seems like the audience is dead-set on CoVid-19, regardless of what you say. These are some topics that can fit into that category to assuage everyone’s seeming thirst for anxiety, but also bring up some new discussions with perspectives and implications beyond a pandemic that are still in keeping with the intent of the show, and perhaps offers a way to inject a bit of optimism, or just have an interesting discussion about emerging trends in society and technology.
Great comment I fully expect over time you will be attacked for it as it makes too damn much sense for the world in 2020
Thanks for the information. I have been hearing conflicting information about whether it is temperature sensitive – one report was that it cannot survive above 85 degrees F, others have said that is not true. Have you uncovered any information on this point?
Can’t survive at all is likely nonsense. Corona Viruses and respiratory viruses in general survive for far less time outside a host the hotter and more humid it gets. There is nothing unique about CoVid-19 in this respect it is true of all corona viruses and influenza. This is why the flu pretty much goes away by late spring every year, it is why there is not much of it in the tropics and there it really is limited to at least the dry season.
There is no need to “uncover” this information it is common medical and scientific knowledge. Just look at how flu responds every year with very little attempt at containment https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season.htm
There is way to much misinformation going one and way too much insinuation that the truth is being hidden, etc. Even the media that is hyping it, as I said in between the hype is telling the truth about it.
Thanks very much.
I am not afraid of things that aren’t scary.
Your analysis is pretty dang good, but I take issue with some of your comments from a recent episode (can’t remember which ep so commenting on your most recent COVID post) where you said people calling it SARS 2 are assclowns trying to scare people. That may be true for much of the media hype, but the “official” name of the virus is “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).”
COVID-19 is the disease caused by the virus, standing for “coronavirus disease 2019” since that’s the year it popped up.
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it
So calling it SARS 2 isn’t totally hype, it’s a semi-standard method of naming so we can all be on the same page about what we’re talking about. It doesn’t really work because so many people are unaware of that fact, many in the media and conspiracy circles willfully ignorant.
The people I was referring to in calling it SARS-2 are the people that officially named it that.
Not those repeating it.
Also responding to tone is a logical fallacy.
Great article, and I agree with almost all of your points. The only thing that doesn’t sound right to me has to do with Fact 6 (“infectiousness not being that high”) and how it relates to Fact 3 (“death & hospitalization rate”). While they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive, given what we’re seeing so far it seems that accepting #3 would appear to weaken the argument for #6. Can you clarify how you see those two are compatible and not in conflict?
At first glance I’d say the evidence looks stronger for #3 and less so for #6, so I’ll try to make the case for higher infectiousness. First, I think comparing COVID-19’s case spread to seasonal flu’s daily case count is an apples-to-oranges comparison given we’re dealing with exponential functions and both starting at different times (seasonal flu had a big head start without any attempted quarantine measures early on), so we won’t get a good picture for comparison until much later.
Second, I don’t think we’ve previously seen any quarantine with the seasonal flu on the scale & scope of what China’s done for COVID-19, so the only data we have for how such quarantine measures work for the seasonal flu is what we have coming in now. Third, the analysts at the WHO have given initial estimates of 1.4-2.5 for R0, compared to average 1.3 for seasonal flu (other research estimates for COVID-19 R0 tend to be much higher so for the sake of argument I’m trying to stick with the most conservative expert estimates).
And if your case for #3 holds, given their estimates for R0 are based on known cases wouldn’t the actual R0 be significantly higher than those estimates, and thus that much higher than the seasonal flu? Admittedly, what makes this whole subject difficult to pin down is the fact R0 is not a static number and changes with the social environment and people’s personal habits, so to say infectiousness comparisons are “fuzzy” would be a massive understatement.
All that said, though, even IF I’m right I don’t think this takes away at all from your central point that there IS hype & exaggeration and that the degree of panic we’re seeing is absurd. Even with the market panic, I think COVID-19 is more a catalyst than a large driver of it, and that along with the recent oil price war there’s some fragility or issue in the credit markets or shadow banking sector that’s causing most of the damage. All there is to do for those trying to stay rational is to adapt to the circumstances & effects of the panicking herd… or put another way, “ride the wave of stupid” the best we can and see if we can’t pick up on opportunities on the way. 🙂
If I were to pick my own weakest contention in this article I would agree that point six would be where I would go, and I would say so much so that I should modify that one to make it clear it is more of a guess on my part that the rest.
I don’t think that 3 makes 6 not possible though. You can totally have more undiagnosed cases and still be a lower contagion rate or about the same as the flu. The reason I feel the claim it is twice as contagious as the flu is over stated is that I honestly feel we would have a lot more cases (of the known variety) if so.
Another way to put it, if it really is 2x as contagious as the flu the asymptomatic rate may be way way bigger than we think. Driving the death rate way way down.
Though I may be wrong on this one, I concede that.
I think it’s safe to say at this point so far, educated guesses are pretty much the best we can do… 😉
Changes made and noted, not in fine print either. I value your input here.
Thanks for all the info you’ve been providing Jack. Quick question. I can’t seem to find how to “drill down” into the data on the website. Am I missing something obvious?
Look at the bottom left you should see some options to drill down to current cases.
got it. thx
Thank you. It was getting pretty lonely out here. Glad to find a confirmatory source for my husband and my own thoughts about the virus. I found you on a search for flu. bell shape curve. coronavirus. farr.
PS. I linked back to this from my blog as it is very readable and has references. Thanks, again.