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Originally Posted by ute83
When exactly did the covid overwhelm the health system? Do you know how many contract the flu every year. Do you know how many people died of the flu last year? Or even this year?
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It didn't in this country thanks to (1) the way it was managed by the various governments even if they didn't do a perfect job (2) the fact that we were fairly quickly able to ramp up ICU capacity and (3) the fact that we had decent amounts of ICU capacity to start with.
Italy, Spain, Belgium and the UK are three of the countries whose health systems did get overloaded in the early phases and one of the consequences of that was a higher than average CMR - and not just by a little with the UK over 15%, Italy at 14%, Belgium at 13% and Spain at 7%.
Estimates for the number of flu cases globally vary as it's often not reported or even reportable but the generally quoted figure is 700-800M cases; 3-5M serious cases and 300K deaths. Just as an FYI that's a 0.04% CMR (based on 700M) which is way below the CMR even in Australia for COVID19. I actually posted the Australian figures (where it is reportable) several pages back but here is a summary of 2019 -
2019 was a bad Influenza year in Australia with 310k
diagnosed cases and 804 deaths which is a CMR of 0.27% (COVID19 is 1.6% in Australia currently) but the diagnosed cases only represent a fraction of the total case numbers anyway.