a lot of people think they had the flu and didn't.
when you consider that only a percentage of people that feel sick even go to the doctor, and when they do go in with flu symptoms and actually get a seasonal flu test, only ~20% actually have seasonal flu...it may not be as common we think.
Agreed. Many people mistake "the flu" for other respiratory viruses ("the common cold"). Or they are exposed to a variant for which they already have some immune response, and the body fights off the infection successfully - they get a mild fever for a day or two, maybe have a light cough or the sniffles, etc., but they don't progress to a full infection. This happens perhaps a few times per year for those in colder climates, and is obviously no big deal for someone who is in otherwise good health.
Then when they are exposed to a new variant or mutation (or maybe they are suffering from suppression of their immune system due to some type of stress) and actually get "the flu", it's a whole different experience. I can recall two bouts with this in my adult life and they were both quite miserable.
With regards to your previous post regarding flu statistics, I actually agree with it and have posted similar things in other threads (usually in response to mouthbreathers making the "it's no worse than the flu" claims, like
@supercorndogs new best friend
@wade2big). The CDC does indeed have shitty data on the flu and relies on what I believe to be excessive extrapolation of a very small data set. Covid statistical tracking likely suffers from the opposite problem. It's not that widespread testing is inherently bad (the so-called "oversampling" term that people liked to throw around), but rather that this testing has been performed in absence of proper controls and without context of important things, like, Idunno, actual patient symptoms.
Put a slightly different way, I don't think we actually have 65 million flu cases per year (although it's likely that number comes close to the number of exposures) and we don't actually know how many people die from it. It's entirely possible that of those 49,783 deaths that the CDC reports for P&I, there are small percentage that actually from just the flu (and the simple fact that these deaths are lumped together is a pretty strong hint as at what often happens in the real world - a viral infection leads to a bacterial infection). Widespread PCR and antibody testing for the flu over the next few seasons would actually be a good use of the extra test capacity that we have on hand, if only we can keep the media from running wild with the numbers.
Coming back around to Covid, current case numbers by themselves are not particularly meaningful as absolute and concrete numbers, but they are also probably not exaggerated and in fact may be understated (that is, for every false positive PCR test, there is more than one undetected case). Antibody testing throughout the past 10 months would be extremely helpful in understanding the progression of the disease, but for some reason remains rare. My wife has gotten an antibody test each time she's donated blood, but IMO we should be doing widespread draws whenever someone enters the medical system for any reason (like, oh, the hundred million or so that will get vaccinated over the coming months). If nothing else, such data would maybe provide some insight as to whether adverse vaccine reaction is due to interaction with existing immunity.
Ultimately, it's completely possible to have a logical and rational stance that says "this disease is really quite bad" and "it's stupid to close businesses and keep children out of school". I have not and will not advocate for lockdowns, but that doesn't mean I'm going to bury my head in the sand and hide from the statistics that suggest this shit is very "real". If that puts me in a misunderstood minority, so be it.
