COVID-19 vs. The Flu
Bottom Line: From the onset of the of the pandemic the comparison between the two has been made.What hasn’t been known with any certainty is exactly how much more severe the coronavirus is than the flu. Early testing wasn’t plentiful, it became clear the virus was active and many people may have been asymptomatic. What we’d seen in the United States and around the world was a very high death rate early during the spread of the virus as those most vulnerable succumbed to the virus, while recovery rates were hard to come by due to a long recovery period and a lack of a prioritization on recovery tests. What we have known based on CDC research is this:
- COVID-19 is 2.5 times more contagious than the traditional flu
- The virus survives on many surfaces and in the air longer than the flu
- COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu
The question has always been how much? After all, the uncomfortable question from a policy standpoint has been what’s the acceptable level of death from an ailment without draconian lockdown measures? We have our first controlled and accredited study of Americans which points to the answer. The University of Washington School of Pharmacy studied Americans diagnosed with COVID-19 in 33 states. What they found is that the death rate ranged from .5% to 3.6% across the country. The overall average was 1.3%. How does that compare to the flu? While the death rate of the traditional flu often varies from year to year based on the severity of the virus, the rate has ranged from .0005% to .1%. This means conservatively, COVID-19 is 13 times more deadly that the strongest strains of the traditional flu. This makes sense as an average of fewer than 40,000 Americans die from the traditional flu every year while greater than 90,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 since March 1st. With this information in hand, the talk of millions of Americans dying if we did nothing looks like it would have been altogether possible. That’s not to say the lock down policies proved to be the best policy, as a separate study recently demonstrated, the most effective way to combat COVID-19 isn’t lockdowns, it’s by wearing masks in public. But if you’ve been skeptical about the coronavirus being significantly different – it is and we should remain smart and safe as we continue to get our lives back in gear.