Last week I posted, in part, about the argument that so many have made — and are still making — that the coronavirus is no worse than the flu. I pointed out that the coronavirus is likely more than twice as contagious as the flu, and that in approximately 3-4 months COVID has already claimed nearly as many lives (at the time about 58,000; now about 73,400) as the most severe annual flu we’ve had in decades (60-80,000).
Turns out I was wrong. It’s likely much worse than that.
According to Robert Verbruggen over at National Review, (hat tip to Jim Geraghty) the infection and death statistics reported by the CDC with respect to the annual influenza are “the result of some guesswork”, which may be drastically overstating the number of infections and deaths from the flu, possible on an order of magnitude of 10x.
As McCormack notes, drawing on an earlier piece from Justin Fox, the 0.1 percent figure does not account for asymptomatic infections, so it can’t be compared with COVID-19 numbers that do. The adjusted number for the flu is probably somewhere around 0.04 percent.
Meanwhile, the Scientific American piece starts with a simple observation from the author: If the flu kills tens of thousands of people a year, he should have seen plenty of these deaths “in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician” — just as he’d seen other causes of death with similar tolls, such as gun violence and opioid overdoses. But he “could only remember one tragic pediatric case.” He called around the country to ask colleagues about it, and hardly any of them saw flu deaths in significant numbers, either.
The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. . . .
In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths — that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus — has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, . . . far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts. . . . In the fine print, the CDC’s flu numbers also include pneumonia deaths.
The upshot is that the coronavirus may be up to 10x more deadly than the flu.
