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At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the question on many people’s minds was, “Isn’t this disease like the flu?” Covid-19 is a respiratory illness with some symptoms that resemble seasonal flu, such as fever and cough.
New tests in the form of blood tests conducted in New York show that Covid-19 is at least as deadly as scientists have suspected for a few weeks. This is not like seasonal flu. It is worse.
This is not to minimize the flu, which is an annual pest that we could be even more proactive in fighting (annual flu shots are important!). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 12,000 to 61,000 people die from the flu each year. (President Trump has routinely sought to minimize the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly early on, by making comparisons to the flu.)
But also, keep in mind: that’s in a given year. Covid-19 has not been around for a year, or even half a year. Before January, this virus was not known to science at all.
However, the virus is already responsible for around 69,000 deaths recorded in the United States as of May 5; and this is almost certainly a low count. About 2,000 people die from Covid-19 every day in the United States alone.
While there is still a lot of uncertainty about the coronavirus and how it will develop, as far as we know so far, it is a threat that must be taken very seriously.
Reasons why Covid-19 is worse than the flu
While the exact global death rate is still unclear, the evidence so far shows that the disease kills a higher proportion of people than the flu (and is particularly deadly for people over the age of 80).
This can be confusing because there are two figures that are used to describe how deadly a virus is. There is the case fatality rate: the death rate resulting from a specified number of confirmed cases. And there’s the infection death rate – the death rate from infection, including asymptomatic infections and mild cases.
April New York data suggests that the death rate from Covid-19 infection was between 0.5 and 0.8 percent, which is in line with international estimates. Estimates of case fatality rates are higher and vary widely from country to country.
According to infectious disease epidemiologist Adam Kucharski on Twitter, that infection death rate for Covid-19 is much higher than the flu, which has an infection death rate of about 0.02 to 0.05 percent. This means that Covid-19 can be more than 10 times more deadly than the flu.
So if we are calculating that the risk of infection is fatal, we need to compare total influenza infections, potentially 1/3 of the population, with annual deaths. As a rough estimate, this suggests that 0.02-0.05% of influenza infections are fatal, that is, 10 times less than COVID (Data: https://t.co/MA6BixjgQW) 5 /
– Adam Kucharski (@AdamJKucharski) March 27, 2020
Comparing Covid-19 deaths with deaths from the flu can be misleading in another way, Harvard doctor Jeremy Samuel Faust writes in Scientific American. The CDC flu death figures “are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms,” Faust writes. The data we have on Covid-19 deaths is from recorded deaths. The CDC may be overestimating flu mortality. Comparing the two is not apples to apples.
But comparing recorded flu deaths to Covid-19 deaths is also revealing. Fausto writes:
If we compare, for example, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April with the number of people who died of influenza during the worst week of the last seven flu seasons (as reported by the CDC), we found that the new coronavirus killed 9.5 to 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is nothing like the flu: it is much, much worse.
The death rate is not the only reason why Covid-19 is worse. It also has greater potential to overwhelm the United States health care system and threaten people with other underlying diseases or conditions. Currently, there is no vaccine against the virus, nor any approved therapy to delay the course of its cost in the human body.
Biologically, it behaves differently than the flu. People with Covid-19 take between one and 14 days to develop symptoms (five days is the median). For the flu, it’s about two days. Potentially, that gives people more time to spread the disease asymptomatically before they know they are sick.
An estimated 25 percent or more of Covid-19 infections it may be asymptomatic. That’s higher than for the flu; About 16 percent of flu cases are asymptomatic, notes a recent report from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “Therefore, while both viruses can cause asymptomatic infections, the asymptomatic fraction appears to be somewhat higher for COVID-19 than for influenza,” the report says.
That makes this virus cunning. The report also says there is evidence to suggest that presymptomatic transmission (transmission before someone feels sick) is more common with Covid-19 than with the flu.
Some flu seasons are worse than others, but facilities can anticipate and prepare for flu cases. Many hospitals, as Vox’s Dylan Scott reported, have struggled in their preparations for Covid-19.
Several months ago, the coronavirus was believed to have made the leap from animals to humans. As far as scientists know, no human immune system had seen it before November, so there was no natural immunity. That means Covid-19 is more contagious than the flu, about twice as contagious, perhaps more; the numbers are still being worked out.
When a flu pandemic occurred in the past, “there was already a lot of pre-existing immunity to the virus,” says Sarah Cobey, infectious disease modeler at the University of Chicago. It is unclear whether there is any pre-existing immunity to Covid-19 based on exposure to other coronavirus strains.
The threat of it causing more outbreaks that overwhelm health systems worldwide is serious. It’s bad enough shaking up the stock markets, leaving people out of work, and causing a recession. It could potentially kill millions, both in the US. USA Like abroad, in the next year or two.
It is also possible that Covid-19 becomes endemic, meaning a disease that regularly attacks humans and will not go away until there is a treatment or a vaccine.
Again: Yes, flu variants are estimated to kill tens of thousands of people a year in the United States. But we still have the flu. And now we have a new burden on top of that: making everything worse.
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