Yup. For example, there's a well-established effect where influenza causes heart attacks and strokes, big enough that the severity of the influenza season has a noticable effect on heart attack deaths. This is, naturally, taken into account when calculating the number of influenza deaths. The differencce is that instead of this being spun as proof that influenza is more deadly than people think, since Covid the press has been spinning it as proof it's leas deadly and that the official flu stats are overstating the number of deaths. For instance, this article - which was quite popular on HN - outright claimed that widespread flu deaths didn't exist because doctors didn't see people dying because of the flu and the CDC was misleading the public by claiming otherwise: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...
But on an apples to apples comparison, aren’t there very few flu deaths confirmed by testing?
And what you cite can’t be proof that the flu is more deadly than people think. If what you say is true, those deaths are in the numbers used for the death rate of the flu.
The point of that article is that perhaps our algorithms for estimating flu deaths are wrong.
Edit: Can someone explain the downvotes? Any error in my reasoning is not obvious to me. The claim above was that:
1. Heart attacks are included in flu death estimations
2. This should make the public think the flu is more deadly than they believe
That seems contradictory, as the public’s belief about the deadliness of the flu comes in stats from point #1. As for the article, the author made no real attempt to rebut its central claim.
The CDC explains its methodology here. There are valid reasons to assume influenza deaths are higher than confirmed tested deaths. But many of these apply to coronavirus as well: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm
