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H1N1 deaths vs. seasonal flu deaths

posted @ Thursday, October 29, 2009 11:29 AM

 

You’ve heard it in words; now here’s a graph from New Scientist. Swine flu, while causing less death overall, is not behaving like a “mild seasonal flu.”

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Fergus on Flu from the BBC has a similar graph, showing the deaths from seasonal and H1N1 (swine flu) in the UK:

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He says:

This graph shows that whereas 94% of deaths from seasonal flu are in the 65+ age group, with swine flu the fatalities are much more evenly spread.

Indeed, 60% of the deaths so far have been of people under the age of 45. 20% of those who have died had no underlying health conditions.

He also has a graph showing the difference in hospitalizations between seasonal and swine (pandemic) flu:

image

He says:

I've included this data because it illustrates the difference between pandemic and seasonal flu. You can see that, whereas those over the age of 60 make up the peak group hospitalised by seasonal flu, it is children who are most affected by swine flu.

I have a link to one of my favourite articles by Fergus on Flu: The Swine Flu Paradox here. What’s the paradox? That this illness is mild in terms of overall death numbers, but causing strain on hospitals (ERs, ICUs) and doctors (for visits re: influenza-like illnesses, or ILI).

Comments
Tiffany - 10/29/2009 11:40 AM
# re: H1N1 deaths vs. seasonal flu deaths
interestink......
Todd - 10/29/2009 12:34 PM
# re: H1N1 deaths vs. seasonal flu deaths
Since I don't know what percentage of the U.S. population is made up by each of those age bands I would love to have a similar chart that instead showed a deaths per 1,000 statistic for each age band.
Risa - 10/29/2009 1:01 PM
# re: H1N1 deaths vs. seasonal flu deaths
Todd, I agree--it would be interesting to see it broken down that way as well. I did notice that the graph above is misleading in that the right hand side (yellow) broke out the 5-49 age group into two chunks: 5-24 and 24-49. The graph on the left shows 3% of deaths in the group 5-49. You'd have to add the two broken out groups to get the accurate comparison: 57% of all deaths from H1N1 in the 5-49 group.
I did find this site with US census data by age group, for years 1995-2000, so you could check the numbers and mock up a rough graph yourself if you were sufficiently interested:

www.census.gov/.../intfile2-1.txt

I'm not going to bother, because I think the graph about shows the main point--the distribution of deaths from H1N1 differs from that of seasonal flu. One is not simply a mild version of the other.
Fiona - 10/30/2009 10:02 AM
# re: H1N1 deaths vs. seasonal flu deaths
Thanks for posting this Risa. I wish they had a breakdown of pregnant women deaths. I'm still so torn about what to do!
Steve - 11/13/2009 1:22 AM
# re: H1N1 deaths vs. seasonal flu deaths
The CDC news release from today said 22,000,000 Americans infected, 3,900 dead. That's about 1/5,600. The normal seasonal flu kills about 1/1,000.
Risa - 11/13/2009 6:06 AM
# re: H1N1 deaths vs. seasonal flu deaths
Steve,
The new CDC numbers need to be taken with a large grain of salt. While I can understand their desire to better compare H1N1 deaths to seasonal flu deaths--the latter of which are based on "best estimates", and no just lab-confirmation--I think their decision to no longer just count lab-confirmed H1N1 numbers is a mistake. And the US is at present the only country whose H1N1 death totals are not lab-confirmed. And yes, while it still means less deaths overall from H1N1, the distribution of those deaths is different, and among some groups, like children, the total number of deaths from H1N1--and I am talking the old lab-confirmed numbers only--is still higher than with seasonal flu. See my entry "Last Year's Flu Season Doesn't Mean What You Think It Does."
I personally am now looking only at Cdn and European numbers and ignoring US data, as I have never relied on "guesstimates" (of how many cases of H1N1, or of how many will be affected/die of H1N1) for anything I have written about H1N1.
Risa - 11/14/2009 10:41 AM
# re: H1N1 deaths vs. seasonal flu deaths
I've updated this entry to include some graphs of UK data to give a broader perspective on H1N1. I am also wanting to distance myself and my analysis of H1N1 from the US data after the CDC's recent decision to no longer rely solely on lab-confirmed deaths for their data. The new US death totals (which more than tripled overnight) reflect what the CDC estimates are closer to the true numbers. While I understand their rationale, and know their methodology was based on a more detailed analysis of deaths in selected areas of the US, I would prefer to keep my hard data (lab-confirmed) and estimates separate. Do note, however--and this is a point missed by most everyone in this debate--that the commonly given death totals from seasonal flu (36,000 in the US according to the CDC; 2000-4000 in Canada according to our medical experts) are in fact ESTIMATES; these numbers are not lab-confirmed hard data.
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