Imagine a variant of the flu that is four or five times more lethal than the common flu and it is spreading quickly. Now, you don’t have to imagine it, because you lived through it. The Swine Flu pandemic of 2009 infected about a billion people worldwide, according to most estimates.

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[–]steaknpotatoes 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

How was Swine flu four or five times more lethal than common flu? The math seems to show it being much less lethal than the common flu which has a lethality rate of around 0.1%

It is estimated that in the 2009 flu pandemic 11–21% of the then global population (of about 6.8 billion), or around 700 million to 1.4 billion people, contracted the illness — more in absolute terms than the Spanish flu pandemic. However, with about 150,000–575,000 fatalities, it had a much lower case fatality rate.

If you do the math on these numbers the lethality rate was only around 0.04%. The common flu has a lethality rate of around 0.1%, so seems the common flu was much more deadly.

The CDC estimates that over 80,000 people died of the common flu of the 2017-2018 winter and that's just the USA alone. 80,000! https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/health/flu-deaths-vaccine.html

(CDC) estimated that about 59 million Americans contracted the H1N1/Swine Flu virus, 265,000 were hospitalized as a result, and 12,000 died. So that's only a 0.02% fatality rate in USA of Swine Flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_in_the_United_States