Covid-19 vs flu, Covid wins
An interesting piece from National Geographic. The studies mentioned there were not peer-reviewed, but the article is easy to read. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/07/coronavir....
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... As he watched the dramatic rise in people visiting restaurants, bars, gyms, and concert venues, he felt it was only a matter of time before the
state’s cases surged—and the deaths wouldn’t be far behind.
“It’s like Bob Dylan said: You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” says Scott, who works at the University of
Texas at Austin, where his model is assessing whether changes in mobility patterns can predict coronavirus mortality.
Texas is just one of the states that has experienced a surge in coronavirus cases over recent weeks after relaxing its physical-distancing guidelines.
However, while the death toll so far hasn’t risen to match, experts caution that the coronavirus has not lost its deadly kick. For one, the disease
takes a while to kill, and humans take even more time to record the pandemic’s fatalities due to administrative red tape. The people who are dying
today were likely infected three to four weeks ago...
Using a more sophisticated calculation called the Infection-Fatality Rate, paired with the past few months’ worth of data, the latest best estimates
show that COVID-19 is around 50 to 100 times more lethal than the seasonal flu, on average...
How to measure COVID-19’s lethality.
Early in the outbreak, many people relied on what’s known as the case-fatality rate—the number of COVID-19 deaths divided by the number of
confirmed cases. But this method became somewhat obsolete once it was clear that many people can get the coronavirus and never show any symptoms, so
they are not being counted as confirmed cases.
Now, after months of studying the pandemic’s ebb and flow around the world, scientists are turning to a similar but more comprehensive metric: the
Infection-Fatality Rate. This statistical tool uses data on known infections, including best estimates for undiagnosed and asymptomatic cases, to put
numbers on how likely it is for an infected person to die from the disease. This kind of calculation is done every year for seasonal influenza...
Using a statistical model, epidemiologists at Columbia University estimated the infection-fatality rate for New York City based on its massive
outbreak from March 1 to May 16. ... According to their data, the COVID-19 infection-fatality rate is 1.46 percent, or twice as high as earlier
estimates .... This risk varies by age, with those older than 75 having the highest infection-fatality rate, at 13.83 percent.
Using the handful of studies that have calculated infection-fatality rates for seasonal flu, Meyerowitz-Katz determined that somewhere between 1 and
10 people die for every 100,000 that are infected. For COVID-19, that number ranges between 500 and 1,000 deaths per 100,000 infections. By his
calculations, the coronavirus is likely to be 50 to 100 times more deadly than the seasonal flu, which supports the Columbia University findings.
The young and the restless?
...More young people under 35 are becoming infected now compared to the last few months of the pandemic, and these individuals are less likely to die
than their elderly counterparts. What concerns University of South Florida epidemiologist Jill Roberts isn’t just the growing number of infections
in young people, but also the fact that they are likely to pass the virus to their older, more vulnerable contacts...
“We have to target these young people. They're the ones that are moving around. They're the ones that are spreading disease,” says Roberts...
Back in March, adults under 50 made up a quarter of all hospitalizations in the U.S., but this share has increased by 10 percent since the beginning
of May, when re-openings started.
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