CDC reports exponential drop of flu cases in final week of 2020

COVID-19 cases may be spiking across the country, but the seasonal flu has dropped to record lows. Reported cases of influenza had fewer than 40 diagnoses recorded during Dec. 13-19.

According to The Washington Examiner, "in the fifty-first week of the year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) 'FluView' data monitoring system, documented only 36 positive flu tests. In 2019 there were a total of  7,703 cases during the same period of time. Only 0.10 percent of tests taken this year came back positive but the five-year average is 15.80 percent positive."

Dr. Brian Garibaldi, the medical director of Johns Hopkins University’s Biocontainment Unit, told the Washington Examiner that "we have to be concerned about the possibility of having a surge in flu at the same time as we're seeing a surge in COVID."

"In any given winter, hospitals are taxed by the flu," Garibaldi said. "There’s always a concern that our emergency departments will be overwhelmed, and ICU capacity will be strained [due to the concurrence of flu and COVID-19 outbreaks], particularly with people who have coexisting conditions that then get influenza."

This would be called a "twindemic," which medical experts and elected officials continue to share concerns of, even though the data appears to disprove the theory.

According to USNews, in 2019, "data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics shows the age-adjusted death rate in America decreased by 1.2 percent from the year prior while the population grew .60 percent."

USNews went on to say that the ten leading causes of death in the US in 2019 "remained the same as they were in 2018, the rates at which seven of those top causes killed U.S. residents declined significantly, corresponding with a slight increase in U.S. life expectancy."

The top 10 causes of death in the US in 2019 were Heart Disease followed by Cancer, Accidents/Unintentional Injuries, Chronic Lower Respiratory Diseases, Cerebrovascular Diseases, Alzheimer's Disease, Diabetes, Kidney Disease, Influenza and Pneumonia and Suicide.

Provisionally, the CDC has said 2,855,000 Americans died in 2019. The CDC estimated that about 177,000 Americans died during the 2017-2018 flu season, from either the flu itself or by complications of pneumonia. The CDC provisional data for 2020 shows that coronavirus has eclipsed heart disease and cancer, but also records a decrease in many other totals of the top causes of death.

As of December 13, 2020, an average of around 931.5 people per day have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. since the first case was confirmed in the country on January 20th. On an average day, nearly 8,000 people die from all causes in the United States, based on data from 2019.

At the end of August CDC estimated that the virus directly caused only 6 percent, or just over 11,000 of the 187,000 attributed deaths. Most of these deaths were in the elderly. These people were on average elderly and had 2.6 other health problems. This implies that a good number who succumbed to the virus had three or more comorbidities.

Some have raised the concern that the tally of reported deaths could be affected because the CARES Act provided money to hospitals for each patient whose cause of death is COVID-19. There have also been disagreements between authorities on how deaths should even be totalled in the first place.

Analysis of death certificates in states like Washington, have even shown an over estimation of COVID fatalities by as much as 13-20 percent.

Additionally, the CDC has tracked a sharp increase in other causes of death in the US over the year such as drug abuse and suicide.

According to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker, there have been more than 333,000 reported deaths attributed to the virus in the US since the beginning of the pandemic.