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COVID-19 Is Far More Lethal Than Influenza
Why the coronavirus is probably much deadlier than the flu
It may seem cliched, but if there’s one constant during coronavirus, it’s change. Whether that’s referring to our lives, which have shifted dramatically over the last few months, or to the scientific evidence which is changing literally every week, the changes we are seeing from day to day are truly enormous.
However, despite this, there seems to be one simple thing we can’t get over during COVID-19: the question of influenza. Virtually every time you see an article published about the deadliness of coronavirus, the author has chosen to compare it to the flu, because if there’s one thing that we need more of, it’s analogies.
The problem is, comparing COVID-19 to the flu has serious issues. The coronavirus is a new disease, which has only been studied for six months, which makes studying things like the number of deaths it causes overall somewhat challenging. On the other hand, we’ve been studying influenza for decades, and know an enormous amount about the disease.
Now, this doesn’t make the comparisons entirely a waste of time, but it does make them somewhat problematic. Take the death rates for both diseases — many people have argued that COVID-19 is only about as deadly as the flu, because influenza kills about 0.1% of the people it infects and some studies have shown that the true infection-fatality rate (the proportion of people who die from the disease divided by the total number of infections, including asymptomatic cases) of COVID-19 is around the same ballpark.
The problem is, while this comparison seems reasonable at first, it’s actually deeply flawed.
COVID-19 is FAR deadlier than influenza.
Infection-Fatality Figuring
The first thing to do is to figure out the infection fatality rate of both diseases. For influenza, that’s relatively simple — just go to the CDC’s website, and they have easy to find estimates right there about how many people get the disease and die each year. If you…
