I have mentioned that the CDC has now evolved their “PI” reporting (Pneumonia and Influenza) into “PIC” (Pneumonia, Influenza and Covid) and this extends to their “FLUVIEW” interactive online flu reporting tool. And yes, it still uses “seasons” that extend from week 40 to week 39. Here’s an example of using the “PI” mode to look at historical flu:
Yes, the flu virus is so seasonal they have created a special calendar for it. And they must think the C19 is similarly seasonal to have added it to the same tool without adjusting the week ranges!
I added some trend annotations since that points out a declining trend which is interesting and is perhaps related to the “dry tinder” hypothesis — but that decline is not the most interesting thing here.
What does make some sense is the relation between the tan peaks of flu only deaths with the excess death peaks in the red line. 2014 and 2017 obviously stand out and there appears to be a bit of a correlation there. And if you do the math you come up with those years peaks resulting in ~1K added deaths in both of the influenza peaks and the red line percentages given average weekly deaths in the US in the 50-60K range pre C19 (a %2 increase works out to around 1K also).
A little known fact is that this chart implies that traditional PI deaths are in the 200K/yr range and it turns out the CDC’s recent math on “flu” deaths is to effectively take 600-1000 deaths from the “P” category for every week (even in the summer when there are few or no flu deaths!) and then add the flu only deaths peak totals that happen in the winter. This is how we get their flu deaths estimates lately swinging in the 30-60K+ range.
While one can argue with the methodology, this chart view at least makes some sense.
But things get more interesting when we switch FLUVIEW into the “PI” only mode and look at the data up to present:
First thing to notice is that the flu is pretty much gone just as many have been noticing but the “PI” red deaths line is not only noticeable but is following the “PIC” attributed curve shape which looks like this!:
So CDC says that we now have recently had a peak 10-11K pneumonia deaths (not many of those would be flu based on recent methodology just described) per week recently that aren’t flu and aren’t C19? But they follow the C19 deaths curve shape instead and are associated with as many as half the C19 deaths?
So even though there’s little flu death, the flu (PI) version of the map is driven by this to be all red!
Hmm.
So this is their new version of the historical 600-1000 deaths/ week from pneumonia that are “just tagged” to flu to make the numbers bigger to justify the flu vacks, etc?
Why not just tag all of these deaths to C19?
UPDATE: Oh, yeah. If you look here at the flu map it confirms hardly any current flu.