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Study finds Covid and flu coinfection has 5.92x greater chance of fatality (medrxiv.org)
4 points by suifbwish on Oct 22, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments


Having both the flu and covid 19 at the same time appears to greatly increase chances of death. We are entering flu season and covid infection numbers are on the rise. Please tell everyone you care about to get a flu shot


Done. Agreed, very good call.

Current death rates are 4 to 5 percent. (Dead / recovered)

And that is coarse as recovered numbers are harder to get at times.

But, just say that's in the ballpark.

What does basically 6x mean?

Is it 0.05 * 6 = roughly 30 percent?

Or, in more coarse terms, anywhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 chance of death as opposed to roughly 1 in 20 or maybe 30?


I believe your math is correct unfortunately


The IFR of covid is 0.125%. So this would make it 0.6%.


Infection Fatality Ratio isn't the same thing.

What I did was take outcomes to arrive at death rates as an outcome.

(Dead people/Recovered people) is roughly 4 to 5 percent.

IFR mixes yet to be determined outcomes with already determined outcomes.

This understates the risk, could be considered best case.

That is:

(Dead People/(people currently sick+recovered people))

If everyone currently infected will live, the IFR is a very best case assumption.

On the other hand, if all those currently sick people were to die, that is a worst case scenario.

In my view, anyone gauging their risk on IFR is doing so on a very wide error margin and said error understates real risk considerably.

None of this takes post infection effects into account. Living, but with organ damage is a real thing and we have poor data on it.

The chance of that happening is currently higher than outcome death rates are.


It's not yet to be determined. Cases misses most infections because they're usually mild. Science knows how many people were infected as a result of serological studies that constantly reproduce the same rates of surveillance (cases) and infections (reality).


How is a case in progress not yet to be determined as a matter of outcomes?

By definition, in progress means we have no outcome.


Oh, yes. In terms of the math, thank you. Agreed.


Yeah that sounds about right.

Somewhere between 1 and 3 billion people will die this winter due to the flu + covid combo.

Sounds about right.




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