NB: I'm not an anti-vaxx/conspiracy/'it's just a cold' loon... but out of curiosity, if we had lateral flow tests for the flu, do you think the numbers of positive tests, and general numbers around positive tests/hospitalisations/deaths would be in anyway similar? Just idly wondering and hadn't seen any discussion around it.
I can do this one, its just a quetion of how brief and concise I can manage to make it:
The headline answer would be no, but there would be a few yes's in the longer answer too.....
In an influenza pandemic or a bad influenza epidemic year, which would feature a large wave, you could perhaps get some similarities in sheer case numbers if we actually did routine mass diagnostics testing for that strain of flu at the time. But those giant epidemics and pandemics dont come along all that often.
And health services are used to being placed under significant pressure during such waves. But they happen far less frequently than with the Covid virus so far. And there are a lot of existing treatments for flu, and we have used vaccines over many years to reduce the burden. There are some similarities in terms of the age profiles of those most severely affected, some of which end up reducing pressure on intensive care and ventilation because we dont do that sort of care for the oldest and frailest people as much as we attempt it for younger people.
But there are still differences in scale which make the nature of the covid waves so far quite a lot worse than typical flu epidemics and we havent had a really really bad flu pandemic for a long time. On paper, fears about brand new types of flu, such as ones that could adapt from birds to humans far more than has been the case so far, do envisage challenges that could be on a comparable scale to this covid pandemic - hopefully it will be a long time before this is demonstrated to everyone in a dramatic fashion. A lot of the planning for such pandemics tends to assume that we wont be starting from scratch in terms of treatments for those though, that for example some of the existing influenza antiviral treatments would help, even if suitable vaccines were not available for a while.
In terms of deaths, lack of mass testing has left this subject as one where there is significant divergence in attitudes between different professionals. Some people in healthcare woefully undercount the number of deaths that flu is implicated in, and arguments about this aspect have emerged on this forum from time to time during the current pandemic. It doesnt get on death certificates as much as it should either. Ultimately we can work round these issues by looking at overall total deaths and excess deaths during periods where a flu epidemic is happening. I have graphs of deaths per day going back to 1970 which demonstrate that on a few occasions there have been pandemics and epidemics of flu which can result in peaks of all cause death that are not dissimilar in size to the death peaks from all causes seen in the first two waves of this covid pandemic. However we need to keep in mind that the similar scale of death is a distorted comparison in that the flu epidemics and pandemics were not met with anything like the same scale of non-pharmaceutical interventions as the first few covid waves were met with. For example there are some studies which estimate that if the UK had taken a Sweden-like approach to the first wave, we would have had twice as many deaths as we actually had, and if accurate that would have pushed the covid death peak much further beyond the death levels seen in the very worst flu epidemics and pandemics of the last 50 years.