every winter there is a large increase in death due to the cold weather and the spread of infections. colloquially this is called 'flu' and 'flu season'. actual influenza is a pretty tough illness and will usually have you bed-ridden, and that's responsible for a lot of the deaths in flu season. these viruses circulate and mutate, and there's roughly a pattern of you maybe have immunity to flu a/b/c for a few years, and every other winter you'll be vulnerable to one of the new developments of flu and so you'll catch it; it's just the way viruses work that the cold weather comes and anyone vulnerable will catch it. generally it dies out primarily because of immunity and all the pathways it can go down socially it already has, but also ends because of the change in weather. ncov19 death spike came in march (which matches the huge increase in ili), which is way later than any usual seasonal flu spike (you tend to get individual spikes of each type of flu going through the population). the ncov19 spike in early 2020 was hundreds of thousands of deaths, which isn't that much in the big picture of things it's just a bigger slice of elderly than usual, but hundreds of thousands of people weren't killed by fucking ventilators lol. it was just elderly people with severe health conditions who were going to die that year or the next anyway instead getting killed by a new virus from some lab in wuhan, or some chinaman eating something gross.
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