Further, the researchers were surely in the 18-49 age bracket. CDC’s estimates for the 2017-18 flu season in that age bracket were 58.8 per 100,000. That is 0.0588% per person per year.
And that’s the whole flu season. To have odds of being hospitalized in november you’d cut that in four at least.
And then the odds of three people in the same lab all needing hospitalization also needing hospital treatment? Even less likely.
Not impossible, but it’s not so simple as suggesting there was a bad flu season. There wasn’t in china then, and flu hospitalization is damned rare in non elderly.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
(It is possible that the “hospital care” in the article doesn’t match “hospitalization” as cdc defines it, but any kind of hospital care for a young person from the flu is still rare)
> Further, the researchers were surely in the 18-49 age bracket. CDC’s estimates for the 2017-18 flu season in that age bracket were 58.8 per 100,000. That is 0.0588% per person per year.
They're using CDC figure for the wrong year to say that younger people were not particularly affected. The 2019 flu season in Australia was
1) much rougher than the 2018 flu season in the US
2) much earlier than normal
Both of these mean that it could well have been an early, rough, flu season in Wuhan that hospitalised these people.
I understand that people really want this to be lab escape, but the way to show it's lab escape is to be honest when you're discounting everything else.