Quote:
HOUSTON — A lot of people compare COVID-19 to the seasonal flu. Some even say they think the flu poses a much bigger risk to children than COVID.
Is that true?
To answer the question, KHOU 11 pulled data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and spoke to Dr. Michael Chang, an assistant professor of pediatrics at UTHealth Houston.
“I think that’s false. I think the data from one year – the 2020 to 2021 flu season – shows that,” Chang said.
According to the CDC, one child under 18 years old died from the flu in the whole country during the 2020-2021 flu season.
“That’s when we were masking, physically distanced, and a lot of kids were doing virtual learning. We had a lot of mitigations in place. One death due to the flu, but we continued to have COVID deaths,” Chang said.
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https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-f..._1627000307956
"Flu activity was unusually low throughout the 2020-2021 flu season both in the United States and globally, despite high levels of testing. During September 28, 2020–May 22, 2021 in the United States, 1,675 (0.2%) of 818,939 respiratory specimens tested by U.S. clinical laboratories were positive for an influenza virus. The low level of flu activity during this past season contributed to dramatically fewer flu illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths compared with previous flu seasons. For comparison, during the last three seasons before the pandemic, the proportion of respiratory specimens testing positive for influenza peaked between 26.2% and 30.3%. In terms of hospitalizations, the cumulative rate of laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated hospitalizations in the 2020-2021 season was the lowest recorded since this type of data collection began in 2005. For pediatric deaths, CDC received one report of a pediatric flu death in a child during the 2020–2021 flu season. Since flu deaths in children became nationally notifiable in 2004, reported flu deaths in children had previously ranged from a low of 37 (during 2011-2012) to a high of 199 (during 2019-2020)."
They conveniently use an almost non-existent flu season to prove their statistics correct. I think it's more reasonable to assume that a ton of the covid cases were actually the flu (or for instance, someone was sick with the flu but tested positive for covid - much like someone could be asymptomatic but still test positive). I find it very hard to believe that masks and hand washing stopped the flu but not covid.