Why did the United States suffer such high fatalities from COVID-19? Was it:
- CDC incompetence
- FDA sluggishness
- Donald Trump's mismanagement
- Poor preparedness planning left over from the Obama administration
Now let's rephrase the question. Why did the the United States and all of Europe suffer such high fatalities from COVID-19? Was it:
- CDC incompetence
- FDA sluggishness
- Donald Trump's mismanagement
- Poor preparedness planning left over from the Obama administration
This rephrasing should make it evident that none of these answers—or anything else unique to the United States—makes sense. Europe had good quality tests earlier than us, but it did them no good. Europe responded sooner than we did, but it did them no good. Europe had shortages of PPE etc. just like we did. Europe had the opportunity to establish travel restrictions before the US, but didn't. European health agencies provided roughly the same masking advice we did. Etc.
In other words, everyone needs to stop the CDC/FDA/Trump blame game because it's wrong. It's obvious that the United States isn't unique among Western nations, and by definition that means the primary cause of our high mortality rate is also not something unique to the US. Our premature reopening in May of last year was responsible for a higher summer death rate, and Donald Trump can certainly be blamed for that, but that's about all.
This is the question you should ask anyone who insists on blaming the virulence of the pandemic on some specifically American screwup: "But what about Europe?" If their theory doesn't explain Europe too, you can just toss it out immediately.
I guess the question then should be what did Canada do so right. Death per million of 656 compared to US 1,804
Very good question. No one that I know has been able to identify a policy or set of policies adopted in, say, Canada and Germany but not in, say, Italy and the UK, and half adopted in the U.S., which explains the divergent results in those various countries.
Lack of Murdoc-esque media seems to be a big policy.
Murdoch is in Italy?
Even more specifically, what did Canada's Atlantic provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador) do right to maintain the amazingly low numbers they show compared even to the rest of Canada? And what did Nova Scotia do wrong lately to get the spike in cases that they're presently experiencing.
It's a contagious disease. It's not so complicated.
Canada's big cities get a fair number of visitors from abroad even in winter. Not too many people go to the Maritime provinces that time of year, though. So it seems likely Canada west of New Brunswick was seeded more heavily with covid than Atlantic Canada. I personally reckon that accounts for the bulk of the difference. We've seen this pattern elsewhere: once covid becomes reaches endemicity, you're in for a long, hard slog.
(But if you do manage to squelch any outbreak before it gets going too severely, you've got a fighting chance, as in the case with Australia, NZ etc. Which Atlantic Canada has mostly done, although obviously Nova Scotia now has a problem. The pattern looks quite similar to Taiwan's. )
Population density, even in their cities? Cold weather (the Nordic countries did way better than the rest of Europe, and even Sweden with its laissez faire attitude did mid-pack Europe). Of course cold weather goes with low population density.
No.
If you compare ND and Manitoba, ND’s COVID mortality rate is 2.7 times higher. Since they are both cold, I don’t think that is the answer and since the majority of MB’s population is in Winnipeg but ND’s is more spread out in smaller cities, I don’t think that is the answer either. I think MB did a better job of locking down and restricting travel. Incidentally we are now in a third wave with 400 or 500 cases a day while ND is down to 50 a day, but that is mostly due to vaccines.
How many of ND deaths were on Indian reservations?
I don’t have that answer, but the Indian population in ND is only 5% of the total, whereas MB’s is 17%, so, again, I don’t think that is the answer.
Big genocide energy coming off Mitchthebitch.
You need to read some archeology of pre-Columbian North America.
But that's...that's an incredibly simplistic conclusion from the data. We can't take data for daily covid deaths and magically arrive at a widesweeping conclusion across all countries.
Population density, population age, social norms, number of vectors for transmission etc. We can't just say "this spike is high and so is this one so treat these two countries the same"! The question is "How DIFFERENT would things be if the US had actually had a president and not an ego-driven grifter?"
We can make broad comparisons between countries, but the more illustrative metric would be USA [reality] vs USA [alternate circumstances]. Or are we pretending a red-state population fed constant lies about masks/vaccines had no impact on the number of deaths?
We can't take data for daily covid deaths and magically arrive at a widesweeping conclusion across all countries.
Sure, we can.
We can make broad comparisons between countries
See? I told you we could.
would be USA [reality] vs USA [alternate circumstances].
Yes, but the latter is not available and fictional evidence rarely works well.
Or are we pretending a red-state population fed constant lies about masks/vaccines had no impact on the number of deaths?
What we shouldn't be doing is coming to conclusions before we actually look at the evidence.
I'll do my best to help you understand. We can make broad (surface level, basic) comparisons between countries, but not widesweeping (covering everything, in-depth) ones. Though, yes, to be more accurate we can make all SORTS of conclusions, but I'm trying to stick to correct ones.
No suggestion of fictional evidence. Only suggesting a comparison, using real evidence, of the impact these factors have where they are and are not present.
For example, we can compare vaccine uptake rates, mask wearing, events following guidelines etc between locations within the US. That's why I used the most obvious example, because that conclusion has already been reached. Based on the data.
We can then extrapolate how the US would look without those factors. Unless you're suggesting we reject extrapolation as fictional evidence?
Though, yes, to be more accurate we can make all SORTS of conclusions, but I'm trying to stick to correct ones.
See? I knew you'd come around.
No suggestion of fictional evidence
Well, then you probably shouldn't have written one as "reality" and one as "alternate circumstances."
Unless you're suggesting we reject extrapolation as fictional evidence?
I am, actually, now that you mention it. Unless you want to give a baseball player the home run championship on May 1 because he hit a lot of dingers in April. Do you?
(My point -- if I really had one besides mocking you -- is that you're using the limitations of KD's analysis to condescendingly dismiss his conclusions while putting forward an analysis that has similarly problematic limitations as if it's the One True Way)
Your attempted mocking and self-delusional condescension aside, you've gone to extreme (perhaps intentional) lengths to misunderstand me. I fear I've stumbled into the comment thread version of the tiny dog that barks at everyone, convinced it is the alpha.
I really don't know how to dumb this down more for you. Fictional evidence would be made-up, yes? Extrapolating involves logical conclusions from partial data. We can't give the home run championship to a player early...but we can MAKE A PREDICTION THAT HE WILL WIN IT. See the difference? I can only imagine the screams of "FICTIONAL!" at your house on election night, as presenters dare to call states.
And as for my analysis, please read again. I offered no analysis. I only offered possible factors that might be more illustrative if examined, and one example to show my argument had merit. My point was that KD was putting aside nuance, and to do so I only had to say "Look over here at all this nuance".
you've gone to extreme (perhaps intentional) lengths to misunderstand me.
Oh, good, the 'you just don't understand my point' rhetorical dodge. No, I understand it, I just find it silly.
Speaking of not understanding -- do try to follow along with my point: you dismissed Kevin's analysis as being based on a flawed approach and then held up an equally flawed approach as worthy of consideration. That's what I'm mocking you for.
Kevin's point: Here are the daily covid deaths for each country. US and UK have similar spikes, so dismiss all conclusions that don't explain both simultaneously.
My point: Er...hey...we might need to do a LOT more digging before we can just dismiss conclusions like "Trump had a negative impact" outright.
Total's conclusion: Some strawman version he constructed in his own head that he has yet to adequately argue. Perhaps involving a complex but flawed statistical study thesis DyingAtheist posted in the town square of Narnia.
Blah, blah, blah. I fell asleep in the middle of your comment. Did I miss anything?
Ha ha ha now who's using a rhetorical dodge. Nice chatting to you. It was a fun argument.
Oh, son, how sad. You can’t even come up with an original response, but had to steal mine. Don’t worry (makes come close gesture with hands). I won’t tell anyone.*
*narrator: he was lying.
"Oh, son, how sad"
The reason I don't bother to visit sites like this one very often. You win the contest on condescension and insult, hands down.
The US SHOULD have done much better than Europe because we lagged a weeks behind them, but Trump chose to publicly mock the risk and did NOTHING (even though he knew better.) Italy did very poorly because they had many Chinese workers, with much travel to and from China. Also, their health care system is not as well developed as that of Germany. The UK did poorly because of Trump mini-me Boris, who similarly downplayed the risk.
" Italy did very poorly because they had many Chinese workers, with much travel to and from China."
So unlike the US. And remember, the initial epicenter in New York, the (LOL) Corona neighborhood in Queens, is one of these neo-Chinatowns that are springing up everywhere as we continue to be colonized.
Italy banned travel to and from China early. Their infection was the result of a business traveller from Germany who went to a ski slope in Austria and a bunch of Italians got infected. And Italy's North has a very well developed health system, on par with Germany or other advanced countries.
Nice story.
Super spreader events have been devastating, no doubt. That bioscience conference in Boston was a killer, too.
This is entirely speculative, but, I strongly suspect when the dust has settled several years from now and more study has been completed, we'll learn covid was beginning to circulate in China earlier than is commonly supposed -- perhaps by July/August/September of 2019 (at low, under-the radar levels). If I'm right Europe could have been getting seeded in early October, when very large numbers of Chinese tourists travel abroad during the annual "Golden Week" holiday. Europe has become an increasingly popular destination for Chinese tourists in recent years, and if anything there's probably been a diversion of Chinese tourism flow from countries like the US and Australia, due to worsening relations.
I head one hella flu right around New Years, 2019-2020. A lot of people in my area did (SoCal). I think it was here then.
Also, El Jefe almost certainly had some idea of what was transpiring in November 2019. Or, at least, his animal handlers in the West Wing should have.
Kevin, Trump may no longer occupy the White House, but he remains an occupant of many minds. Thus the assertions will persist.
Perhaps we might revisit some if your posts from earlier in the pandemic.
"If their theory doesn't explain Europe too, you can just toss it out immediately."
No, I don't need to develop a Unified Theory of Pandemic Response simply to observe that a populace being fed lies by a malevolent president had some effect on the pandemic response here.
Orange man bad!
Finally, someone agrees Jim Boeheim is the worst.
But what about Vietnam? Or what about New Zeeland, or Australia? Could it be that having a government that took the pandemic seriously and was trusted by its citizens can make a major difference in death rates?
Is it really the case that the US should be happy with well over 600,000 deaths just because Europe had a lot of deaths too, when many of those deaths were avoidable?
It's amazing to watch this press conference from Feb 13, 2020, and realize that the risks and the best responses were known back then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDQtXzu6z08
Is it really the case that the US should be happy with well over 600,000 deaths just because Europe had a lot of deaths too, when many of those deaths were avoidable?
Is there some place in the post in which KD says we should be happy? Or are you just strawmanning to within an inch of your life?
Yes, he is. The only point of such a comparison is to feel better about one's poor perfomance.
It's like when one gets a D in school and tells your parents, but Johnny also got a D! It's only to make you feel better, it doesn't change the objective truth.
Yes, he is. The only point of such a comparison is to feel better about one's poor perfomance.
No, he's not, and there are lots of other reasons to do the comparison, including trying to figure out what happened instead of just blithely going with our assumptions.
Actually, the grading curve and competitiveness of the particular school dramatically affects how one feels about a particular grade. A B+ average at Exeter when I was there made you a High Honors student and would generally get you into an Ivy college. It wouldn't have been quite the same at Berkeley High.
Not in this one per se, but in several other posts stretching back to last year he has called the US response anything from very good to spectacular, so given the entire track record of his opinion on this, saying he is happy with how the US did is not too big a stretch of the imagination.
The criticism was that KD thought that we should be happy with 600,000 deaths. That's different and it's the worst kind of conflation to combine them.
It's been great for the Social Security Trust Fund.
Why didn't the US have the low mortality rates of most of the world outside of Europe?
I'll note that arguing that the factors may not be unique to the United States does not, in fact, let people like Trump off. If both Europe and the United States have similar political issues that cause the election of incompetent and mendacious politicians (cough*BorisJohnson*cough) with autocratic tendencies (cough*ViktorOrban*cough) in both places, that would explain similar leadership issues with the pandemic. We can certainly blame Trump for the specifics, just as we can blame Johnson for what happened in the UK.
Does this mean that Kevin doesn’t assign any blame to Brazil’s Bolsonaro too?
It wasn’t Donald Trump’s mismanagement that was the problem. It was his denial (like Bolsonaro) and his touting of quack medications and blaming of the MSM, China, etc. for the problem. In fealty to him many red states have policies that lead to failures to mitigate the spread of the disease and they also have the worst vaccination rates. It also lead to most of the partisan rancor relating to the disease that the country is now going through. Mistakes and incompetence are one thing shared by just about everyone but Trump’s actions were deliberate. He know the truth but said things that he felt would suit him politically.He is proud of his actions.
Trump's attitude was picked up and magnified by would-be "dear leaders" across the world, e.g. Hungary, Brazil, etc.
In his years in office, Trump tried to decimate the CDC and public heath in general. Those organizations involved were already short on people and demoralized going into Covid--and it showed up in the mistakes that were made.
I would suggest that much in the way that all happy families are alike but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own peculiar way, I think it’s fair to say that while the successful countries did roughly the same things, it’s clear that each of the unsuccessful countries screwed up in its own peculiar way.
We screwed up mainly because of Trump and the inability of the Republican Party to govern, as opposed to rule. There was sabotage by Trumpkins. And the careerist timidity of people at the CDC didn’t help.
As the article in today’s NYT suggests, a different set of political failures created Europe’s huge third wave. There was a power grab by the EU technocrats (who turned out to be good at grabbing power by lousy at actually running a union of nations. And national leaders like Macron who were unwilling to take the kinds of measures that the successful countries uniformity adopted.
So, everyone and everyplace is different. Except maybe for Brazil and India who stupidly elected Trumps of their own.
Does 'unfalsifiable' mean anything to you?
Yes.
The answer is:
3. Donald Trump's mismanagement
The buck stops there. Whether other countries did better or worse is immaterial. We did badly, Trump was the one responsible.
No need to over think it.
Public health is almost exclusively the province of state and local governments in the US, as it should be in a continent spanning country. You may have noticed that everything from vaccination schedules to lockdown schemes to mask requirements are set by governors.
The three states with highest Covid deaths per capita are NY, NJ, and MA.
All deep blue.
Don't forget that tRump started sabotaging our ability to deal with pandemics and epidemics shortly after taking office. The NSC Pandemic Response Team was disbanded in the summer of 2017. He cut the budget for the CDC's foreign offices (the disease equivalent of the DEW line) by 80% - shuttering 40 of the 50 facilities.
Not surprising that the folks at the CDC were cowed by late 2019 - tRump had made his disdain for actual science and facts painfully clear by then.
What an odd post by KD. For Mr. Data Rich Charts abandoned any analysis worthy of the name and chose data completely out of context to arrive at a very weird conclusion: you can't blame my accident on flaws in my driving, because my neighbor had an accident too!
You can do better than this, Kevin.
Oh, ye Gods. If someone who had an accident pointed out that five of their neighbors had accidents at nearly the same time in the same location, maybe just maybe we'd start looking for ice? Flawed road design? It's not an unreasonable argument.
To belabor your belabored response to my analogy: If one neighbor slid off the road and into the trees and lived to tell about it, to warn all his neighbors to go slow because of the ice and bumpy roads, but a couple other neighbors and I decided to ignore his warnings and ended up in the trees as well, I still think you can blame me for reckless driving.
So, yes, absent the warning, it might not be about the driver? Excellent, thanks for supporting me.
Sounds like stupidity to me. Flawed politics that let DT come into power.
"This is the question you should ask anyone who insists on blaming the virulence of the pandemic on some specifically American screwup: 'But what about Europe?' If their theory doesn't explain Europe too, you can just toss it out immediately."
Kevin, that's bad logic. It's akin to arguing that my client couldn't have burned down his house for the insurance money because all kinds of houses burn down all the time and the prosecutor has no evidence that my client somehow also burned down those houses.
Incompetent leadership in the U.S. does not preclude incompetent leadership elsewhere. Plenty of countries have done pretty well through the pandemic (Canada for chrissakes--the closest thing in existence to a U.S. control group). And your argument also ignores the fact that the U.S. normally plays a pretty critical global role in monitoring and preventing new pandemics--a U.S. failure absolutely can explain why other countries also failed. That's even before we get to the reality that U.S. leadership is influential (politically, culturally--you name it) outside of the U.S.
So if the United States reopened prematurely in May, what did Europe do? Reopen prematurely in August? Because their disease burden subsided very impressively in May and June and July, but by October they were once again faring no better than the United States. Did they have the right answer and lose their grip on it? Or did economic circumstances and popular discontent just catch up to them eventually?
Europe isn't just one big country. You need to look at them separately. Some European countries did very well, Denmark and Norway for example. Some were only pretty good like Germany and some were as bad or worse as the US. Lets just take a few.
Italy- They were first. Italy was the country where we learned how bad it could be. Inpatient mortality rates now are about 1/2-2/3 of what they were early on. So if Italy doesnt have that early surge at a time when death rates were higher, they are now just another average country.
UK- Early on the decided to just let everyone get sick and have herd immunity, then they panicked when the hospitals started filling. Take that away and they are another average, maybe high average country.
France- Didnt follow them much but I think they were also on the edge of the early group.
Then almost everyone, Europe and US, decided Covid was over and got hit with the big winter wave. On that you are correct and we are all alike.
Steve
The fact that Europe massively screwed this up, too, in no way justifies our own failures. The specific points of failure may differ, but there is reason to believe that the West as a whole bungled this.
Keep in mind that the virus spreads exponentially in a susceptible population. It takes only a relatively tiny slip up for things to rapidly spiral out of control. Successful response to this kind of threat requires doing many things, and doing them all very close to perfectly. Look what is happening now in Taiwan. They had done so well until now, but they loosened their grip slightly on the quarantine requirements for arriving airline crews and now they are facing community spread that may already be too far gone to contain and suppress.
Clearly we did not do everything needed, and what we did was done half-heartedly and sloppily. It is no surprise that our efforts failed. The situation in Europe differs in detail, but the overall approach there, too, was lax and the results only slightly less awful.
If I may rebut:
Lancet Study Finds 40 Percent of U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Could Have Been Avoided
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/lancet-study-40-percent-u-s-covid-19-coronavirus-deaths-avoidable-unnecessary.html
'The journal came to the conclusion by comparing the U.S. health outcomes on the coronavirus—the country leads the world in COVID deaths and confirmed cases with more than 27 million—with the weighted average of other G-7 nations. So it’s not a wildly abstract conclusion to draw: the U.S. could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives if it had just performed similarly to its economic peers.'
The US is fat. Obesity is a factor in Covid deaths. The US has a lot of black people. Black people in first world countries are a factor in Covid deaths (probably related to obesity).
Spoken like a JEOPARDY! champion.
@Mitchell Young
Gotta get rid of those darkies. The fat ones first.
And further rebut:
''No doubt' US has undercounted COVID deaths: Fauci'
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-05-undercounted-covid-deaths-fauci.html
I agree with many other commentators: this is an odd post. If two cars crash it can be for different reasons. If the "malfunctioning brakes" theory doesn't work for one of them, because its driver was simply drunk, it in no way proves it doesn't work for the other.
Italy for one had bad luck. It was hit first. Other European countries, and the US even more, had at least some time to learn from its fate.
If we want to look for similarities, then lump all of Europe together and call the European Commission the equivalent of the federal government. Then, in both cases, it can be seen that the federation failed and the states had to do it all. Hampered therein by an overreliance on the loudmouth but passive federation.
Another resemblance between Europe and the US, as compared to East Asia: no popular experience with mask wearing.
The U.S. has had cases dropping far more than many European countries. This happened once a competent President came on board. We have proven that with proper leadership we can get this country doing the right thing. We had manufacturers who could have geared up to make PPEs.Heck we know of companies that offered to retool to do just that. We could have had masks mailed to every citizen. The Post Office offered to do that.
We are a huge country with great manufacturing capacity. We should have done BETTER than Europe, if we had put all of our resources into stopping the spread of COVID. Instead we squandered time, which resulted in more deaths.
We can never prove that a better response would have resulted in fewer deaths, but the way in which cases and deaths have dropped so much should be an indication that we had the ability to respond better than we did.
When I suggested a long time ago that the post office deliver a packet of masks to every residence, some other commenter thought that would be far too expensive to be undertaken. That was when $700 per taxpayer was universally accepted as a justifiable relief payment.
This is saying,
if there is any chink in your armor the disease will exploit it.
At any point in your response if something isn't working, isn't working enough, or isn't there at all, that will be enough to derail the whole thing.
And to further rebut:
Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess-mortality-due-covid-19-and-scalars-reported-covid-19-deaths
America Fumbled the Pandemic. Michael Lewis Shows Us How It Happened.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/05/michael-lewis-book-interview-premonition-trump-pandemic-cdc/
The United States and Europe suffered high fatalities from COVID-19 because of unregulated market ideologies.
A few comments
1. Given the low population density in the US compared to Europe (not to mention most Asian countries!) the US ought to have performed significantly better than Europe (a fair comparison would be with the Scandinavian countries minus Sweden which did much better than the US).
2. The fact that the US and Europe screwed up to about the same extent does not prove that they screwed in the same manner. Europe handled the first wave much better then the US; by June the case numbers were way down almost anywhere in Europe. Then they slowly crept up. By August everybody could see that exponential growth was happening and that a second wave was all but guaranteed. But the governments (all of them!) kept reopening further--mostly under pressure from the right wing parties who in turn were at least partially influenced by Trumpism. Nobody had the guts to do what was necessary and so the second wave became much more devastating than the first. I sum it looks about equally bad across the Atlantic but the pattern of screw ups is distinctly different.
Europe handled the first wave much better then the US
Spain, Belgium, Italy, France, Britain and several other countries were utterly ravaged by covid in the first wave.
This logic is pretty terrible, Kevin. As other have pointed out in more detail, there may be some shared reason or reasons much of the Europe and the US did poorly. Or there may be different reasons. Or most likely, some shared and some different reasons. I personally find it unlikely that trump's insanity, incompetence and disinformation wasn't a significant and ongoing contributor in the US.
Or most likely, some shared and some different reasons.
Exactly. Or, to put it slightly differently, the mere fact that another government might have made some similar mistakes as the Trump administration doesn't mean the Trump administration wasn't responsible for making those mistakes itself. It's also possible -- I'd say highly likely -- that the US possessed some major advantages (more people living in sunny climates, more wealth, more research capacity, fewer land borders, highly robust sub-national governments, sovereign currency, unified national governance, etc) that it squandered. If so, who is responsible for this? Seems reasonable to posit that the administration/party that were in active denial wrt to the pandemic -- and in many cases were actively hampering efforts to fight it -- bear the lion's share of the blame.
I don't think New Zealand/Australia was in the cards. But Canada/Germany should have been.
That's a damn low bar, Kevin. Just because our leadership and institutions performed similarly to other leadership and institutions around the world doesn't mean it wasn't incompetent.
It was nearly impossible for large countries to do really well (like New Zealand), but there arevsome factors that certainly impacted how well or poorly a nation did compared to similar countries in terms of deaths:
1. Number of old people & number of people with conditions that increase risk of death. This has been a major factor for many middle income countries. Lots of people who arevat high risk of death, and a health system that can't possibly keep up.
2. Practices around eldercare. Lack of PPE in nursing homes, staff whomwork in multiole locations, and transferring people between hospitals and nursing homes.
3. Having large, concentrated low-income communities. These communities are unable to distance, often have language barriers that slow public health information, and are less able to test and quarantine.
4. A strong right-wing media and political presence. Germany started to look like everywhere else once its right-wing began emulating those of other countries.
5. The bad luck of being a place that got several very early cases. Any place with significant spread prior to mid-May had a much harder time of it. There just wasnt the the testing, medical knowledge, etc.
When you look at Sweden, I think we need to look fairly closely at what actually happened there. Sweden has a large immigrant/refugee population, and serological testing showed very high infection rates in those communities. They clearly failed to focus enough on their most vulnerable communities. They also did everything wrong in nursing homes, resulting in a lot of death among the elderly. I live in a state that imposed much stronger general restrictions than Sweden, but we had many of the same issues in our nursing homes and refugee communities (Hmong death rates were quite high). Sweden's deaths per 100,000: 139. Minnesota's: 131.
It was nearly impossible for large countries to do really well
China's pretty big. And, while people inevitably respond "but dictatorship" the reality is most of what China has done is not predicated on being an authoritarian system (any more than in South Korea/Australia/New Zealand).
In my view one of the big ironies of this whole crisis is that the main thing needed to prevail against the virus -- denying it the hosts it needs to reproduce -- isn't very complicated conceptually. It just requires thoroughness, effort and attention to detail.
I head one hella flu right around New Years, 2019-2020. A lot of people in my area did (SoCal). I think it was here then.