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.
I'm not ignoring their first sentence. I'm explaining that their first sentence is wrong, and that isn't changed by looking at US figures for the year before.
China doesn't follow normal flu seasonal patterns. Instead of a single winter peak China sees flu all year with dual peaks in summer and winter - and the summer peak is higher. Flu starts in the south of China, and moves north over the year.
This particular type of flu was early, not just in Australia but world wide.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/inf...
> The season has started slightly earlier than usual. It is too soon to predict how the season will develop in terms of peak week, severity and duration.
About severity: we can look at death. This flu season showed increased mortality. And we can look at hospitalisation. It had increased rates of hospitalisation. We can look at ages affected: some strains affected younger people.
> A(H3N2) is typically associated with serious health impact in older age groups.Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, are already seeing increased rates of influenza hospitalisation. There is no evidence of significant excess mortality at this early stage, however experience during past seasons suggests a significant mortality impact on the elderly during A(H3N2) dominated seasons.
> B virus circulation might be associated with a higher burden on younger age groups, as already observed in Portugal.
I know flu strains differ year to year - that's the point. The world pays attention to the flu in Australia because that tends to predict the strains in flu seasons elsewhere. This is part of the flu surveillance work to develop seasonal flu vaccines. This flu surveillance recommended that the vaccination included Australia strains:
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/who-recommendation...
> On 18–20 February 2019 in Beijing, China, the World Health Organization (WHO) agreed on the recommended composition of the quadrivalent influenza vaccine for the northern hemisphere 2019–2020 influenza season: an A/Brisbane/02/2018 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus, a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus (B/Victoria/2/87 lineage), a B/Phuket/3073/2013-like virus (B/Yamagata/16/88 lineage) and an A(H3N2) virus component to be announced on 21 March 2019. The recommendation for the A(H3N2) component was postponed in light of recent changes in the proportions of genetically and antigenically diverse A(H3N2) viruses to allow more time for the selection of the appropriate virus strain. It is recommended that the influenza B virus component of trivalent vaccines for use in the 2019–2020 northern hemisphere influenza season be a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus of B/Victoria/2/87-lineage.
My point is that there was a severe flu strain in Australia in 2019; this strain started making its way around the world; it would be unsurprising to see it in China at the time the article talks about; and that talking about the US stats for 2018 mean nothing because that was a different flu season with different flu strains.
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.