Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned against comparing the new coronavirus to the flu Sunday, responding to comments from White House adviser Jared Kushner
Jared Corey KushnerSunday shows preview: Mail-in votes, USPS funding dominates political debate before conventions Newsweek apologizes for Kamala Harris op-ed Jared Kushner denies Trump ‘promotion’ questions about Kamala Harris MORE made earlier in the day.
CBS ‘Margaret Brennan notes that in the previous segment, Kushner said he was comfortable sending his children back to school, claiming that they “six times as likely” died from the flu as from the virus.
@ScottGottliebMD says Americans “should be careful” when making comparisons of #COVID to flu when it comes to children, the incidence of flu is far greater in children:
Flu➡️upwards of 400 deaths per year
COVID-19 ➡️90 dead so far pic.twitter.com/xi6McTsN4B– Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) August 16, 2020
‘Well, I do not know where the six times are coming from. We need to be careful, I think, about comparison with flu. This infection has not been so prevalent in children every year, because flu is every year, there have been about 330,000 diagnosed infections, “Gottlieb said.” If you believe we are one in five to one out of 10 infections diagnosed in children, there may have been about three million children infected here. “
Gottlieb admitted that coronavirus in children did not appear to be “as prevalent” compared to the flu. However, he noted that in addition to about 90 deaths of children due to the virus, there are indications that in some cases it can cause inflammatory post-viral syndromes in children.
‘That there is a lot that we do not understand about COVID in children. “I think we need to be careful about comparing flu and the death and illness we see in flu relative to COVID,” Gottlieb said.
The former FDA commissioner also acknowledged that although he had expected a spike and decline in deaths at this point, “there has been a fairly persistent level of infection, hospitalizations and deaths in the last few weeks.”
“We’ve had more than a thousand deaths a day for at least two weeks now, more than 50,000 infections a day on average,” he said. “We hit 55,000 last day. Hospitalizations have dropped a bit, but they haven’t really started to decrease anytime soon. ”
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