The Government should treat the flu similar to how it has treated Covid, the Economist has argued. Here’s an excerpt:
The Government’s plan is to deal with [COVID-19] in a “similar way to other existing respiratory illnesses” such as the flu. In practice, that means less surveillance, fewer vaccinations and a greater willingness to accept infections and deaths. This trade-off seems reasonable to many (though less so to clinically vulnerable people). But dialling down the response to be more like the approach to flu is not the only option. Another would be to treat flu more like Covid. “There is a fatalism about flu,” says Professor Ajit Lalvani of Imperial College London. “Every year the winter flu season overwhelms the NHS. Applying the lessons learnt through Covid could help.”
If ever there was a time to think differently about the disease, this is it. Epidemiologists worry that two years of low exposure to flu may have caused immunity to wane to low levels. That may result in an extraordinary number of cases this winter, at a point when huge waiting-lists will still clog up the National Health Service (NHS).
Before asking how things might be done differently, start with how things usually are. Pre-Covid estimates based on serological surveys suggest that as many as one in five Britons contract the flu each year. The vast majority of people get a relatively mild illness but for some a trip to the doctor will be needed. A study in 2007 estimated that flu results in some 800,000 visits to family doctors each year. Unlike Covid, it particularly affects the very young as well as the elderly: children under 14 accounted for two-thirds of visits.
If a respiratory infection worsens sufficiently, treatment at hospital is needed. As many as 40,000 people are hospitalised each year with breathing difficulties caused by the flu; the average total in-patient cost is £7,500 ($9,360). Because respiratory infections are slow to shift, patients stay for 11 days on average. Occupancy of the NHS’s 100,000 hospital beds rises from about 88% to over 95% during the winter; flu plays a big part in that.
Official data suggest that, on average, around 500 people died from flu each year in the decade to 2020. But since flu infections are not systematically diagnosed, that number is a massive undercount. To estimate the true number of deaths from influenza, epidemiologists model excess winter mortality, disaggregating flu infections from cold snaps that also lead to death. On this basis an average of 10,000 died each year from flu in the ten years to 2020; in the winter of 2014-15 as many as 29,000 died.
The leading business and current affairs magazine suggests that this could mean widening the vaccination programme, including to children, increasing surveillance and testing, and encouraging those infected to isolate and wear a mask while symptomatic. It also says failure to go further than this, while likely, “may have consequences” come the winter.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
“Treat the Flu Like Covid, Says The Economist”
Too bad they, and the Times muppets and the Groan and the rest didn’t say to treat “covid” like the flu two years ago.
Three weeks to flatten the curve? Liars. Never again.
” Epidemiologists worry that two years of low exposure to flu may have caused immunity to wane to low levels. That may result in an extraordinary number of cases this winter,”
Yes, flu disappeared didn’t it, and problems this year will be nothing to do with “vaccines” damaging immunity.
Epidemiologists worry that two years of low exposure to flu may have caused immunity to wane to low levels. That may result in an extraordinary number of cases this winter,”
weird that apparently you can’t be exposed to the flu but you can be exposed to a virus that’s similer to the flu, and if your exposed to a virus that according to the media is worse than the flu, surely a persons immune system who is un jabbed would be able to deal with the flu better. Would be interesting to note this winter what percentage of jabbed and un jabbed end up in hospital etc. Perhaps this is why they are bashing more jabs as they know this is what keeps the jabbed alive.
Do you think they’ll give us those figures?
The list of attendees at the Bilderberg Convention shows The Economist to be far more than muppets…. Along with some odious MPs, the former head of the Civil Service & head of GCHQ
https://t.me/robinmg/20200
Sure, let’s have another national and worldwide public health panic attack over influenza, a disease we’ve lived with -or died with – for millenia. Yep, the annual mask up, WFH, dodgy injections, sounds like a great recipe for economic, educational and medical success, just like the current pandemic panic attack
But surely a single human life is worth more than “the economy,” as a dozen journalists used to remind us at Boris’s press conferences. One life saved from flu is worth a billion lost through starvation.
Except we don’t have ‘journalists’ any more. They’re all partying hypocrites (the better-paid) or social-media-scrapers (the intern class).
Or as I call them, sell outs!!
From the Government’s own Health and Safety Executive (HSE) publication “Tolerability of Risk from Nuclear Power Stations” – page 50 para 17:
“The Department of Transport’s consultation exercise secured widespread endorsement for its proposed value of life for application in road transport appraisal. This value now stands at £660,000 for a life.”
The document was last revised in 1992 so if we apply the Bank of England’s inflation factor we get £1,080,000 for a human life at 2022 prices.
I would guess that NHS’s NICE department use a value lower than this when deciding spending on new drugs/treatments. Yet the Covidian idiots work on the principle of ‘if it saves just one life any cost is justified’.
It also says failure to go further than this, while likely, “may have consequences” come the winter.
thats all very well but there will be consequences anyway, people do unfortunately die from a range of illnesses, from cancers to strokes, heart attacks to diabetes. for example according to the ons, in 2019 there were 530,841 deaths registered in England and Wales, a decrease of 2.0% compared with 2018 (541,589 deaths).
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregistrationsummarytables/2019
so saying unless we do this this and this and give our lives up there will be consequences, people will still die anyway from many other things than the flu, and if your over a certain age well the prognosis for flu has always been worse than say someone in their teens etc.
The statement that always gets trotted out is “the NHS will be overwhelmed” completely ignoring the cuts in services and also closing hospitals with a rising population.
Every year there are deaths from hypothermia, especially if the weather is harsh. The appalling position we’re going to be in, on fuel and nutrition, is pretty much guaranteed to reduce the ability of many to withstand circulating diseases like ‘flu.
Of course, everything will be blamed, apart from the root causes i.e. the actions and inactions of politicians and others.
I blame global warming.
The Economist is the in-house rag of the Klaus Schwab gang. Walter Bagehot would be disgusted with what it’s become.
Rag is the right word for it
Indeed. Follow the money.
Covid was a massive money-spinner, and the spivs who own the economist would like that repeated every year, please and thank you.
Here comes another grenade from the ruling classes. Take cover!
NHS “Overwhelmed”?
No. The NHS is completely unfit for purpose.
Exactly. We’ve reduced the number of emergency beds every year until we have one of the lowest ratios of ICU beds to population in the world, and then we are shocked every year when they get actually used.
Yep and today we find out from an article in the Telegraph that the NHS is using and paying for private health care for NHS employees while the general public are languishing on waiting lists.
You can’t make this shit up.
The NHS is rather like the remnants of the Azov regiment cowering in a cellar to “defend” Mariupol, having destroyed it. Without weapons from the West, they were “overwhelmed,” leaving the city better off.
What else should one expect from this Rothschild-funded rag?
Criticism of the chosen ones!
How dare you.
Treat flu like Covid? That would mean banning all treatments which actually work, and closing down our economy and the NHS?
Then you give all our money to Big Pharma for a couple of years, and finally withdraw all support and tell us to live with it….
That’s it. The NHS’s190 billion pound budget is for pharma companies, managers, diversity officers, admin staff and such like, not for treating patients.
Anyone who is sick should stay home until they are very sick and then only when they are very sick should they come in to hospital to be finished off. But they should refrain from calling an ambulance and bring themselves in instead, otherwise the ambulance service will be overwhelmed.
The NHS is an extension of the state. You give it tonnes of money and that money then used to push you around and abuse you.
The pattern of abuse won’t end until we cut off the money.
I would like to respectfully suggest that experts on this matter are requested to shut the hell up. Where were you when the NHS reduced its capacity from 160k beds to 100k and then does nothing but moan that they haven’t got anywhere to put people. Billions of additional funds are put in, wasted on excessive inclusion and diversity, and more middle managers, and not an extra bed to be seen. We know flu comes around every year, don’t we.? Why does everyone in the NHS appear to be shocked that it could happen again.?
If TRPTB really cared about the good health of its subjects and the “strain on the NHS”
they could always encourage people to exercise more, eat better food ie less processed rubbish, severely restrict the use of sugar and stop scaring the sheep to death – or make the MSM tell the truth (same thing really).
Anyone could be forgiven for thinking they actually want to kill us.
Treat Flu like Covid. Let us live under medical fascism forever more like, just think of the power and control they have and want.
Well the economist is the pamphlet of globalists.
They love this shit and are wrong about absolutely everything.
I can’t stomach their propaganda.
‘Treat the flu like covid’
To be fair all covid19 is was rebranded flu, no lay person or medic can distinguish flu symptoms from covid symptoms simply by observing those symptoms, you need the magic of the PCR test for that and as we know the authorities can generate an epidemic of false positives out of thin air with that technology.
I think in many ways we already do treat the flu like covid in that the authorities inject millions of people (mostly older) with a flu vaccine each year and said flu vaccine provides no benefits only serious harms.
The most serious harm being the causing of dementia. It is becoming increasingly clear that the aluminium contained within flu vaccines (aluminium is an adjuvant in numerous types of vaccine) lodges in the brain of the vaccine victims casuing inflamation and dementia. Dr Christopher Exley an aluminium expert has been warning about this for some time, his book Imagine You are an Aluminium Atom expolres this and other aluminium related problems.
This Anals of Internal Medicine published study looked at a large cohort below the age of 65 (who the government do not pay GPs to inject with flu vaccine) and followed them past 65 when the vast majority were now injected by the jab happy GPs.
The study found –
The data included 170 million episodes of care and 7.6 million deaths. Turning 65 was associated with a statistically and clinically significant increase in rate of seasonal influenza vaccination. However, no evidence indicated that vaccination reduced hospitalizations or mortality among elderly persons. The estimates were precise enough to rule out results from many previous studies.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M19-3075
So this year if your chuumy GP comes at you with the flu jab remember it provides you with no protection against flu but it will add a bit more aluminium into your body and some of it will lodge in your brain taking you one step closer to the joy of dementia.
Actually, with the state the country’s in, and the expected future collapse of our infrastructure, we might welcome dementia…
Those left to look after you wouldn’t agree.
And if Mrtea made you perhaps just a little sceptical about even orthodox vaccines – take the trouble to look at this (it’s a rubbish day, up North anyway)
http://vaccinepapers.org/
Only a matter of time before it’s pulled.
That aluminium would be better used to construct a Faraday cage with which to protect one’s brain from dementia ’caused by 5G’.
‘Treat the flu like covid’
Translation – next time you have a flu an NHS Docotor will try to put you in an induced coma and wreck your lungs with a ventilator, and if you are double plus lucky he/she/they will also put you on a known toxic dose of HCQ just to prove that a known toxic dose of HCQ will kill you.
Oh yes, and let’s furlough everyone from October to April every year too. Heck, why not just lock down the world permanently?
No. Stop trying to play God. Infections have been part of life for millions of years. Our bodies have learned how to deal with them, and we need to keep that process going. Stopping people getting infected is madness.
By all means give people advice on how to stay as healthy as possible by eating good food and taking plenty of exercise, but drugs and unnatural interventions are not a long-term solution. In the end, they would kill us all.
They have learnt nothing. It’s still https://dailysceptic.org/2022/01/04/its-the-economist-stupid/
As true now as it was then. Good article, David.
If people actually have the ‘flu, they feel far too ill to go out and engage with other people. This is just encouraging hypochondria.
Very true. From personal experience (flu twice over the years) I would say there’s no way you could even get to the doctor’s surgery you feel so crap.
They seem to be saying that the measures taken in response to covid have lowered our previous herd immunity to influenza. Their conclusion is that we should do more of it in order to lower immunity even more. That’s pretty stupid even before considering the damage that such measures do to mental health, the economy, social cohesion, education and so on.
And yet their readers will lap it up.
You know what, treating the flu has become a yearly fear among the elderly. Why?? Because the pharmaceuticals created that fear by saying 60yrs and upwards should have a yearly flu jab. This creates an atmosphere of anxiety.
Flu has been around since humans started to congregate in large cities and towns. Most people would stay at home if the became ill. With the push of yearly flu vaccines people thought they could carry on as usual. Even with a runny nose and a cough. They thought they were ‘safe’. We now have health fear and over reliance on pharmaceuticals.
It’s crazy. Stop running to the doctor or A&E for the least problem. Take responsibility for your health and STOP worrying. Stress levels go down, the body heals itself with rest.
A somewhat confusing article which greatly exaggerates the number of ‘flu’ cases. ‘Mild flu’ is of course the common cold, though this is complicated now by the existence of Covid. In either case, admission to hospital marks the change in definition.
People die now …. off’
I find it hard to believe the around 500 flu deaths figure. NZ has that many (normally) with a population on 5 million.
Their ‘Green’ world means that we use less of everything, except Pharmaceuticals
“…except Pharmaceuticals…” which are largely synthesised from fossil fuels. Like face masks. And testing kits. And smart phones running vaccine passports. What have I missed?
The manufacturing process is moot (to them) the sales are not
Shortly to become ‘Soylent Green’ world.
I’ve long advocated, privately (of course), that there should be mobile collection units that tour the streets and invite representatives of the lower orders aboard for a chat. Electric stunner, a whiz through the macerator into the tank below, and off to the processing plant. Can’t be that far away now. Can it?
Covid symptoms are the same as getting the Flu, however if you self isolate, as directed, that ensures that the Coronavirus/Flu which you caught, potentially becomes Covid, which is what the medical establishment want, so they can inflict you with their rMNA vaccines, however this is an easy fix and what I have been doing from the outset – no vaccines for me ever (for 29 years now): 3 minutes from preparation to job done!!
Everything else you have read, or heard, is totally irrelevant – how simple is that?
Covid Crusher: Mix one heaped teaspoon of Iodine table salt in a mug of warm clean water, cup a hand and sniff or snort the entire mugful up your nose, spitting out anything which comes down into your mouth. If sore, then you have a virus, so continue morning noon and night, or more often if you want, until the soreness goes away (2-3 minutes) then blow out your nose and flush away, washing your hands afterwards, until when you do my simple cure, you don’t have any soreness at all, when you flush – job done. Also swallow a couple of mouthfuls of salt water and if you have burning in your lungs, salt killing virus and pneumonia, there too.
My simple salt water cure, kills all Coronaviruses and viruses, as soon as you think you have an infection, or while self isolating, before the viruses mutate into the disease in your head and body, for which there is no cure – that is, after you have been out shopping, or mixing with people with potentially, Omicron or Delta viruses, or any other virus.
It washes behind the eyes, the brain bulb, brain stem (Long Covid), The Escutcheon Tubes to the inner ears and the top of the throat which is at a point roughly level with half way up your ears and not where your mouth is and down the back of your throat, when sore.
I have been doing this simple cure for over 29 years and I am and others, never sick from viruses and there is no reason why any of you should be either – when your only alternative are those vaccines!!
I do my simple preparation, after I have been out and about, or come into contact with people who have been vaccinated – it has kept me safe – and I hope it keeps me safe for the foreseeable future as Graphene Oxide is in the very air we breathe, outside, as well, but now from the vaccinated!!
Simply put, if the inside of your nose is dry and crusty, you are OK, if your nose is runny, you really need to do a salt water sniffle as quickly as possible and monitor the results, to see if further salt water sniffles are necessary, but later on in that evening – so far – I remain immune from potential Covid infections, doing just this.
No vaccines for me – ever – pass on my free cure and have those pass it on too
” Epidemiologists worry that two years of low exposure to flu may have caused immunity to wane to low levels. That may result in an extraordinary number of cases this winter”
Just exactly what did they think would happen when the country was shut for covid. Why is it we all knew it would happen and they, the experts, didn’t.
My conspiracy theory: A patent for a genetically modified SARS virus was filed by Chapel Hill University over 20 years ago (fact). There have been over 70 other patents filed since (fact). In 2019 Pfizer filed a patent and a few days later a patent for a vaccine for that virus (fact). I believe the release of the virus was well-rehearsed by the world governments.
After the antics of Professor “Pants Down, Lockdown” Ferguson, would in their right mind would give any credence to anything that is said by any Imperial College academic?
It makes more sense to treat covid like the flu.
sure, why not take the same interventions that worked so perfectly with covid19 and use them against a similar viral disease?
great thinking…
Also my first reaction.
Wrong way round. Should have treated convid like flu. Stick to economics, Economist.
Another criminal piece of dirt subverting Britain from within. Im sick of these scumbags being given airtime. Imperial College is just a nest of Gates funded charlatans who impress noone with a functioning brain. The notion that the liars at The Economist care about peoples health is a joke. They couldnt care less about anyone but their own little clique.
Another example of the criminals in the media peddling lies to cover up for the fact that the jabs have wrecked peoples biology (turning billions of cells into factories of a toxic synthetic lab designed protein as a way to make peoples health improve is so obviously dumb its beyond words – but apparently our “health service” is full of dumbasses who think this is all good) and that more and more people will become more and more severely ill as the reality of this genocidal convid injection programme becomes more significant.
So, the Economist would like to have the economy further ruined by seasonal flu, to finish the job started by the Wu-flu Panic?
If every year the Notional Health Service is “overwhelmed” by flu, why don’t they do something about it? Also, the coof is basically a respiratory disease, like flu. Booyah!
Lockdowns once a year, one way arrows, masks, social distancing, business closures, NHS restrictions and all the rest?
If it wasn’t needed before why do they think it’s needed now. Unless of course you don’t care about all the negative consequences of such actions.
Is this what might be described as a “Trial Balloon”? The idea is to make a seemingly outrageous proposal and see how it runs, not with the general public of course, but with the unelected who actually hold power. I like the comment in a post below that flips this absurd idea on its head by suggesting that we should have treated Covid like ‘flu, not ‘flu like Covid.
“Treat the flu like Covid”? No – treat Covid like the flu.
Beginning to think masks, surveillance, vaccines, restrictions and fearmongering are all combining to form an end in themselves, rather than a means to an end. If their pie-in-the-sky goal was to control viruses through suppression, then by now there would be some kind of concrete evidence that all their so-called suppression tactics had worked to exert some kind of control.
The only concrete evidence there is so far, is that viruses of any shape or colour will track their own bell curve, or “wave” of building, peaking and receding regardless of any request by the state to radically alter our lifestyles.
And therefore we can safely assume that the goal that they hope to achieve by pulling out of the bag all of the same pointless tools must be something OTHER than a public health objective.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see the validity of this logic.
The lessons from covid are that there is almost nothing that government can do, and the huffing and puffing of supposedly intelligent people demanding “something must be done”, just makes it worse.
‘But since flu infections are not systematically diagnosed, that number is a massive undercount.’
Deaths from influenza normally are estimated with reference to excess Winter deaths compared with rest of year. So it cannot be a ‘massive undercount’. The reason for this is because fit healthy people do not usually die of ‘flu, it is elderly with comorbidity who are the bulk of its victims – just like CoVid.
The people who die, don’t die of ‘flu or CoVid, they die because they would die anyway. Why is this so difficult for some to understand?
Had CoVid deaths been estimated the same way, the number of deaths would have been very small and in the same range as Winter deaths due to Colds and ‘flu in other years.
Since we have been managing ‘flu quite nicely for 100 years, why the need to change and increase the death toll from restrictions and vaccine injury?
’Flu vaccines aren’t effective either.
Where is the drive from government, academics (with a few notable exceptions) and the media to get the population healthy so they aren’t so susceptible to illnesses such as flu, Covid etc and also type 2 diabetes probably the biggest drain on NHS resources? It makes me so angry that people queue up for the vax and have the gall to denigrate the unvaxed but are not prepared to do something to improve their own health.
People need time to be able to devote to exercise, cooking from scratch and being social (in person) if they want to be genuinely healthy. Unfortunately TPTB like us all to be at work as much as possible, keeps us out of their hair and making money for big business. You can’t work full time and have a family and maintain your health, there’s just not enough time. And pushing up the cost of living means work hours can’t be reduced without risking not being able to pay the bills. All planned, you see.
In my experience flu was worse than covid. But … the doctor (by phone) just said rest, you’re fit and healthy, it’ll pass. Bloody horrible it was, couldn’t walk for 2 days.
With Boris having already trashed our economy and peoples’ lives with covid these idiots want more of the same!
The problem with economists is that they don’t live in the real world.
I’m sure they’re already working on Flu viruses in Big Pharma’s clandestine Labs right now, wonder when they will release one?
The Global elite is desperate to maintain their authrority they wouldn’t care if it took a few milllion innocent lives to force another lockdown to buy them some more time, after all, they’ve proven they’re cetainly evil enough to contemplate it.