A fair number of people have let themselves be misled by the notion that the new coronavirus is no more lethal than seasonal influenza. Some are asking, not all of them politely, why social distancing, shuttered workplaces and a springtime without sports are necessary.
In fact, the virus that causes COVID-19 is far more dangerous than ordinary flu. It’s twice as contagious, and those whom it sickens are far more likely to die.
Moreover, the widely-quoted figure of up to 60,000 “normal” flu deaths a year is an estimate of doubtful accuracy. The national death toll from the new virus passed 63,000 in barely two months, and stands at 73,000 as of Wednesday. This is a hard count of cases — confirmed by testing — not an estimate.
“Comparing COVID-19 deaths to flu deaths is like comparing apples to oranges,” says a Jan. 28 essay on scientificamerican.com.
“With each new day of data that we collect about this novel coronavirus, the more we realize that by most metrics it is far more dangerous than the flu,” says a blog post by Southern Strategies, the lobbyists for Florida Blue, the state’s largest health insurance company.
What medical science calls the “reproduction rate” defines how many people will be affected by one contagious person. With COVID-19, that figure is 2.5 — one carrier will infect more than two other people. The rate for seasonal flu is 1.3, just about half. So the new virus is twice as contagious.
The virus also is up to 10 times more deadly, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The death rate among confirmed cases is about 6% nationally, compared to 0.1 for seasonal influenza. For every 1,000 Americans who test positive, 60 will die of the new virus. Among every thousand who catch the seasonal flu, one life will be lost.
Another key difference is that there are vaccines for seasonal flu, making it less contagious. It’s noteworthy, though, that their effectiveness varies from year to year because flu strains mutate rapidly. So does the common cold, another form of coronavirus, for which no vaccine has ever been approved. Development of an effective vaccine against the virus that causes COVID-19 is not guaranteed.
Bear in mind that the new contagion is a silent stalker, infecting people who pass it on without falling ill themselves and never knowing, unless they are tested, that they had it. The national debacle in developing and distributing test kits has left the nation fighting a war without knowing the enemy.
That situation is improving, but there is a long way to go until we are testing enough people, especially those without symptoms, to know where and to what extent restrictions on work and social gatherings can be safely relaxed.
Regardless of statistics, COVID-19 is an exceptionally terrible ordeal for those whose infections inexplicably turn from mild to critical. And when they die in hospitals, they die alone, except for the medical professionals who are trying to save them. The virus is too contagious to let family members be at their bedsides, compounding their sorrows.
The essay on the Scientific American website, questioning the flu death statistics, was written by an emergency physician and Harvard Medical School instructor, Jeremy Samuel Faust, who could remember only one flu death, a child’s, in his seven and a half years of practice. He had seen deaths from traffic accidents, gun violence and opioid overdoses “all the time.” If there were even more flu fatalities, why could he and colleagues he consulted remember only a very few?
“All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced,” he wrote. “For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.”
The problem is that the estimates of up to 60,000 flu deaths annually are produced by the Centers for Disease Control “by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms … based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations and deaths they believe went unreported.”
But in the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s count of 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, which is far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.”
While the CDC may be overestimating normal flu deaths to encourage vaccination, it is definitely not hyping COVID-19 fatalities. If anything, it is undercounting them.
Comparing confirmed death rates from both causes, Faust concludes, the coronavirus kills “between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.”
Without a vaccine, social distancing is still vitally necessary.
And so are the masks.
Wear them. Please.
