zlacker

>>pseudo+(OP)
A gentle reminder that some of the 2019 flu strains were pretty rough. See eg Australia having a lot of problems with it.

>>DanBC+r1
That was Feburary 2019 in Australia. Wuhan’s flu season would have been November 2019. Different severity, the flu season in the northern hemisphere 2019 was not especially severe.

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)

>>graeme+i4
Don't look at the CDC stats for the previous year. Look at the Australian stats for 2019 -- these were different strains of flu.

>>DanBC+A6
Well, why don’t we look at Chinese numbers instead if Australian in that case. See figure one here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259005362...

For all of China, in November 2019, it looks like less than 2000 positive test swabs. The number of hospitalizations would be lower.

What are the odds that three hospitalizations would come from a single lab in healthy people? Not impossible, but not probable. Flu hospitalizations are very much clustered in the elderly and very young.