Author notes

316 - Until It Breaks

El Cid

on May 5, 2020

Any gun people reading this page are probably chomping at the bit to tell me I'm giving bad firearms advice. Well… you shouldn't take firearms instructions from a webcomic! For the record, what the cyborg assassin lady (Vesna) is telling Abby, is not the way I learned to shoot a pistol, so this isn't the author speaking through one of my characters. There's actually an important plot reason why I had this part scripted the way I did, though that won't come into play until near the end of the chapter. Yes, I know I have a reputation for being a somewhat sloppy writer, but there is actually some structure and planning going on here!





So this has been kicking around the interwebs a bit lately. Is it actually true that the flu is deadlier than CoViD-19? There's a lot to consider. First off, it's worth pointing out that universal averages are mostly meaningless. When they say the fatality rate for CoVid-19 patients is 7 percent, that's really an average of a whole slew of populations with their own average mortality rates. For those in their eighties and people undergoing chemotherapy, the mortality rate is over 20 percent, whereas for teenagers it's a fraction of a percent. Lumping all those averages together gives us a final number, which doesn't actually provide much useful information… but we're going to roll with that here, because it's easier to work with. I'm a lazy bitch.

So, as the story goes, we at one point believed the mortality rate for CoVid-19 was around 3.6% to 7.4% overall… but now that they've started antibody testing to find out how many people in the general population have already been infected and developed an immunity, they're finding that a LOT more people have been infected than we originally thought. This means the 3-to-7 percent estimates are way high, and a recent Columbia University study extrapolated that the actual fatality rate for CoViD-19 is probably closer to 0.6%. A (almost certainly invalid) Stanford study using a similar methodology found it to be even lower, at 0.1%. So how does that measure up to the flu? As it just so happens, the fatality rate for the flu is approximately 0.1%.

So, case closed, right? CoViD-19 is no more lethal than the flu, and we can all stop worrying. But not so fast. That 0.1% flu death rate is basically the same as that 7.4% number: Those are the known, documented cases; the ones severe enough to be on record. The same way that CoViD-19 infections are likely much more widespread than what's reported by the medical industry, so too are influenza infections. So the actual fatality rate for the flu is way less than 0.1%, and way less than even the lowest estimates for CoViD-19 lethality.

Also, because SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus that the general human population has not developed an immunity to, it's going to infect way more people than the flu. So even if they had the exact same fatality rate, SARS-CoV-2 would still kill a lot more people worldwide.