Many people are baffled to hear that tens of thousands of Americans still die of flu every year. The CDC estimate for 2017-2018 is 61,000, markedly more than die in all auto accidents. Yet I’ve never heard of any specific person dying of flu. So who are these people?
The answer, roughly, is: the elderly. Here are combined influenza and pneumonia death rates by age from National Vital Statistics Reports:
What about total mortality? Is the relatively low population of 85+ Americans enough to outweigh their enormous mortality rate? No; check out the numbers for 2017:
Thus, Americans 85+ experience almost over 40% of all combined flu/pneumonia mortality, while Americans under 45 years old endure less than 2%. The main reason we rarely hear about flu deaths is that when people die of flu, folks at the funeral probably call “old age” the cause of death. Logically, this isn’t even wrong, because there’s joint causation; if the deceased weren’t old, they almost certainly wouldn’t have died of flu. And philosophically, you can accurately say that most people who die of flu would soon have died of something else. Wiping out the flu would save a lot of lives, but sadly wouldn’t save them for long.
READER COMMENTS
Charles
Mar 25 2020 at 10:02am
in contrast:
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/have-many-coronavirus-patients-died-italy/
Thomas Sewell
Mar 26 2020 at 12:48am
It’s similar with the flu. The reason why you don’t hear about all the “flu” deaths of old people you know is because they mostly died of pneumonia, or even something else.
See for more details:
jens
Mar 25 2020 at 11:39am
Hm, that sounds a bit misleading. Influenza and pneumonia both are a wide range of causes, the delimitation of which is probably not always done properly in the daily clinic routine, especially with the elderly. At the same time, a single pathogen, that also mutates relatively slowly, attracts so much attention.
Philo
Mar 25 2020 at 3:18pm
“Almost over 40%”? That should be “almost 44%.”
Charley Hooper
Mar 27 2020 at 12:11am
That’s if we stop at making the flu less deadly. If we do the same thing for cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, hepatitis, hospital-acquired infections, dementia, depression, Alzheimers, etc., we may find that regular people can live a long, long time.
Mark Bahner
Mar 28 2020 at 1:40pm
That’s just what Bill Murray found in Groundhog Day (and what Italians should be understanding right now):
Groundhog Day: The homeless man lesson
A sad fact: old people die
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