A New York City pharmacy offers vaccines for COVID-19 and flu. Some researchers suggest that the two diseases may pose a similar risk of death for those infected.
Ted Shaffrey / AP
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Ted Shaffrey / AP
A New York City pharmacy offers vaccines for COVID-19 and flu. Some researchers suggest that the two diseases may pose a similar risk of death for those infected.
Ted Shaffrey / AP
Will COVID-19 become no more deadly than the flu for most people?
That’s a question scientists are debating as the country enters its third pandemic winter. At the beginning of the pandemic, COVID was estimated to be 10 times more deadly than the flu, sparking fear among many.
“We all asked the question, ‘When does COVID look like the flu?’ Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. “And, I would say, ‘Yes, we are there.'”
Gandhi and other researchers argue that most people today have enough immunity — acquired from vaccination, infection, or both — to protect them from becoming seriously ill from COVID. And this is especially so since the omicron . variant doesn’t seem to make people sick like previous strainsGandhi said.
So unless a more virulent variant emerges, the threat of COVID has been greatly reduced for most people, which means Gandhi says they can go on with their daily lives, “the way you’re used to living with the seasonal flu.”
But there are still many different views on this topic. While the threat from COVID-19 may be approaching that of the flu, skeptics still doubt it has reached that point.
“I’m sorry – I just disagree,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House medical advisor, and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “The severity of one versus the other is actually quite pronounced. And the killing potential of one versus the other is actually quite pronounced.”
COVID is still killing hundreds of people a day, meaning more than 125,000 additional COVID deaths could occur over the next 12 months if deaths continue at that rate, Fauci noted. COVID has killed more than 1 million Americans and it is third leading cause of death in 2021.
A bad flu season kill about 50,000 people.
“COVID is a much more serious public health problem than the flu,” said Fauci, noting that this is especially true for older adults, the group most at risk of dying from the disease. .
Debate over how to calculate the number of deaths
The COVID mortality debate revolves around what counts as a COVID fatality. Gandhi and other researchers argue that the daily death toll is due to COVID magnified because many of the deaths blamed on the disease are actually from other causes. Several people who died for other reasons also tested positive for coronavirus.
“We consistently see that over 70 percent of our COVID hospitalizations fall into that category,” said Dr. Shira Doron, an infectious disease specialist and professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. “If you count them all as hospitalizations, and then those people die and you count them all as COVID deaths, then you’re overstating significantly.”
If deaths were more accurately classified, Doron said, the daily death toll would be closer to the number of people who get the flu in a typical season. If this is true, the odds of a person dying if they become infected with COVID – known as the mortality rate – would be comparable to today’s flu, estimated to be around 0.1%, or possibly even as low. than.
In one New report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Thursday, the researchers tried to filter out other deaths to analyze mortality rates among people hospitalized “primarily for COVID-19.” They found that the mortality rate was significantly reduced during the omicron era, compared with the delta period.
But Fauci argues that it is difficult to distinguish between deaths caused by “COVID and deaths” caused by “COVID. This disease has been found to stress many systems of the body.
“What’s the difference to someone with mild congestive heart failure, going to the hospital and having COVID, and then dying of severe congestive heart failure?” he asks. “Is it due to COVID or is it due to COVID? COVID certainly contributed to it.”
The second reason many experts estimate that the mortality rate of COVID is probably lower it appear Currently many infections go unreported because of home testing.
Mortality rate is a ratio – number of deaths to number of confirmed cases – so if there are more actual cases, that means the chance of an individual dying is lower.
“I believe we have reached a point where, for an individual, COVID poses less risk of hospitalization and death than the flu,” said Doron.
Dr. Ashish JhaWhite House COVID-19 response coordinator, agrees, especially because COVID vaccines and treatments are better than flu vaccines.
Jha told NPR: “If you update your vaccines today and take advantage of treatments, your chances of dying from COVID are very rare and certainly much lower than your risk. Trouble with the flu.
Risk remains high for the elderly and frail
But Jha stressed that omicrons are so contagious and are infecting so many people that generally “at the population level pose a much greater threat to the American people than the flu” and that it can still be. caused a greater number of deaths than the total number of deaths.
And, mortality rates for any disease vary by age and other demographic factors. Importantly, COVID is more deadly for the elderly and medically weak than it is for younger people. Recently data from CDC showed that compared with 18- to 29-year-olds, 65- to 74-year-olds were 60 times more likely to die; people aged 75 to 84 have a 140 times higher risk; and those 85 and older had a 330 times higher risk.
The danger is especially high for those who are not properly vaccinated, boosted and treated. And with COVID still spreading widely, they are still vulnerable to social exposure.
Despite being younger, healthy people can sometimes get very sick and even die from COVID, that becomes rare.
“I think it’s important for people to have an accurate sense of reality in order to move on with their lives,” Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University. “If their risk assessments are dominated or influenced by these overestimated mortality and hospitalization rates, I think that’s the problem.”
Waiting to see if the sample in is confirmed or not
Other researchers still argue that COVID is still much more risky than the flu.
Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University in St. Louis, who has done research comparing COVID to the flu.
Al-Aly said: “We have never, in the history of the pandemic, in all our studies to date, found that COVID-19 poses a risk comparable to influenza. “. “It’s always a higher risk.”
Some experts are waiting for more data showing a clear trend in mortality.
“Perhaps I would feel more comfortable saying things like, ‘Oh COVID is similar to the flu’ when we actually see a similar pattern,” Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in the field of public health and health policy. “We’re just starting to see that, and I haven’t really seen it in a sustainable way yet.”
Many people also point out that COVID can increase the risk of long-term health problems, such as prolonged COVID.
“Even people with mild to moderate symptoms from COVID can have persistent COVID,” says Fauci. “That doesn’t happen with the flu. It’s a completely different ball game.”
But Gandhi also questioned it. She said that much of the estimated risk for prolonged COVID comes from people who were severely ill at the start of the pandemic. And if you explain itThe risk of long-term health problems may not be greater from COVID than from other viral infections like the flu, she said.
“It’s really severe COVID that leads to long COVID,” Gandhi said. “And as the disease has become milder, we are seeing lower rates of long-term COVID.”
In fact, some experts are even concerned that this year’s flu season could be more severe than this winter’s COVID surge. After flu seasons that were very mild or even non-existent during a pandemic, this year the flu has hit Australia. And what happens in the Southern Hemisphere often predicts what happens in North America.
“If we have a severe flu season, and if the omicron variants continue to cause essentially mild illness, next winter could be a much worse flu season than COVID,” said Dr. . William Schaffneran infectious disease researcher at Vanderbilt University.
