Flu in the US kills around 12k to 50k per year, with a particularly bad year every few decades getting up to maybe 80k. Omicron killed somewhere between 150k and 250k in the US in less than a year, and that was with free vaccines that were highly effective against death easily available to pretty much everyone who was not a young child.
That doesn't sound like no worse than the flu to me.
Flu numbers typically are a small sample size and extrapolated based on respiratory-like illness admissions in hospitals nationwide.
You know you have to substantiate such a wild claim, right? Nobody is counting patients with broken arms that happen to have Covid as Covid patients.
But covid is different because it is under the spotlight and faces more scrutinity. And the disctinction as covid being the main cause, a comobidity or a unrelated pathology was never clearly made since the beginning of the pandemic.
In March 2022 (this year), sleuthing by members of the public into inflated pediatric death counts resulted in the CDC deleting 72k alleged covid deaths, blaming a coding error for the overcount: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/24/cdc-coding-err...
In one county in Colorado, a coroner pointed out that 2 of 5 covid deaths were actually due to gunshot wounds: "Grand County Coroner Raises Concern On Deaths Among COVID Cases" (Dec 2020): https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/grand-county-covid-dea...
The way that a "covid case" or alleged "covid death" has been counted may have improved over the past 2 years, but 70+ thousand purported covid deaths were just admitted to have been illusory a few months ago and there most definitely have been significant financial incentives for hospitals to claim a particular patient had covid and further incentives for specific treatments (remdesivir, placing them on a vent, etc.).
Let me also point out that this wasnt some grand failure. We were in a situation in which what ever information we could get was really helpful. But you have to be aware, that there is not magic box somewhere that spits out perfect information. All data collection has its limitations, its why we still know very little about long covid. Because getting that data is incredibly difficult, especially at scale.
https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-patients-nyc-hospitals...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01453-0 relating to the study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01840-0
The cause seems to be aggressive filter bubbling. We see it above too - there are highly upvoted people saying nothing more than "it can't be true, I don't believe it, it must be a right wing conspiracy". Any information that undermines government narratives just gets mentally erased, causing a distressed reaction of "that claim is CRAZY" to almost any attempt to discuss known data or facts.
Someone with COVID could well be in hospital for weeks if not months and if things get serious they could end up taking a bed in the ICU.
It would be highly unlikely to see someone in ICU with just a broken arm.
Further googling reveals this similar headline: "Over 40% of NYC’s COVID-infected hospital patients admitted for other reasons"
This then begs the question, if in fact 60% of people are going to hospital because of COVID that indicates a very big problem.
Hospitals by their design are always meant to be full and their size will be determined based on an expected amount of demand.
If the hospital contains these unexpected COVID cases that then means many people who need to go to hospital will not be going to hospital only because the beds are taken up by these COVID patients.
January 2022 would include ~3/4ths of the pandemic's time and deaths so far.
> Omicron in general for most people is no worse than the flu, unpleasant but bearable.
If you have 10% of the hospital population in hospital with COVID (and just for COVID) you will have degraded the performance of the hospital by 10%.
This is because hospitals are designed to operate at maximum capacity (i.e all the beds are in use and there is a waiting list to get a bed). Every bed in use by a COVID patient will just add someone to the waiting list.
So my question would be what percentage of patients are in hospital because of COVID and only because of COVID?
That number is a very good measure of the pressure that hospital system will be under and my guess is it will be much greater than 10%.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/01/jeff-jacks...