Today’s ever-growing data and access to data means that many, people and organizations alike, are trying to make more data-driven decisions. The forefront of decisions today are centered around COVID-19. Despite seeing hundreds of visualizations, including great ones showcasing particle simulations and heatmaps of the most hard-hit areas, I’ve often found myself wondering about how this year’s flu strain compares to influenzas in years past. I decided to dig a little deeper.
A quick google search of “influenza deaths by year Canada” led me to a research paper focusing on the influenza strains from 1992 – 2009 in Canada. I found very interesting numbers that I thought would be fun to visualize and share. I chose to chart the results, summarized in Table 1, of the aforementioned research paper.
The research paper shows statistics up to 2009, however there is still a large gap (up to present day) as it doesn’t account for the 2010 decade. Thus, while this data is accurate, it should be taken lightly, as various factors such as population density and medical advances may have changed the outlook.
In my opinion, the data tells a very different story of how deadly COVID-19 is in regards to past influenzas...
What surprised me most about the data was that influenza was possibly more deadly in the last few years of the last century than in this year! In terms of absolute numbers, they are higher than COVID-19 to date. In terms of deaths per day, they are lower.
I should note that the per day stats were calculated using different time periods. For the data from Table 1 – October 1 to May 31 was used as the time period, while the COVID-19 data used January 15 to present day. This isn’t an accurate representation since I believe the experts didn’t use the same rigour in the early part of the 2019/2020 season versus after January in 2020.
I chose to include adjusted deaths in the chart to consider the difference in population in Canada between the years of the study and present day. Today, population experts estimate that there are approximately 31% more people residing in the country versus the first year of the study.
This short analysis was done simply to highlight some numbers from long ago. The insights from this chart are evolving daily, just like the opinions and statistics related to COVID-19. As we look to get back to our lives, perhaps we can remember to look to the past for reminders. After all, history has taught us that we shouldn't forget the past, but learn from it.
*Population data was sourced from Wikipedia for historical data and Worldometer for today’s estimate.
**The 2002/2003 and 2008-end of 2009 datapoints were omitted from the chart due to not being statistically significant.