COVID-19 No Worse Than the Flu? Hardly – MedPage Today

The number of confirmed and probable deaths from COVID-19 coronavirus were vastly greater than those due to flu this year in New York City, researchers determined.

From February 1 to April 18, the ratio of excess deaths in New York City was 21 times the number of deaths from seasonal influenza during this time period, reported Jeremy Samuel Faust, MD, of Harvard Medical School in Boston and Carlos del Rio, MD, of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, in a preprint posted on medRxiv.

COVID-19 has been compared to seasonal flu many times, with annual deaths from seasonal flu often cited in comparison. The CDC estimated a range of 12,000 to 61,000 influenza-associated and pneumonia deaths per year from 2010 to 2019. In fact, the CDC estimated 24,000 to 62,000 Americans have died of influenza in the current flu season.

These, however, are based on "a series of assumptions about the underreporting of flu deaths." CDC statisticians boost the number to account for perceived under-testing, hospitals' record-keeping lapses, and flawed death certificates.

In contrast, the COVID-19 death toll as of April 27 reached 55,000, according to the widely cited Johns Hopkins University tracker. This is a raw number, Faust and del Rio pointed out, making the comparison to the CDC's heavily massaged estimates an apples-to-oranges situation. Many researchers have argued that deaths involving COVID-19 are also undercounted for many of the same reasons.

Faust and del Rio said a better comparison would use influenza deaths as actually recorded.

In New York City, they found, raw CDC data indicated 619 flu deaths from Feb. 1 to April 18, 2020 -- as opposed to the agency's count of 5,870 COVID-19 deaths in the city.

The authors also examined excess all-cause deaths in New York City as counted by the CDC, which totaled 13,032 in the same period. That figure was nearly identical to the city health department's count of confirmed and probable COVID-19 deaths (13,240).

"Conditions on the ground do not support statistics that suggest that seasonal influenza has killed approximately the same if not many more Americans than COVID-19 has," they wrote. "By abandoning the statistical misadventure of estimating influenza deaths, and instead simply relying on reported counts, a far better quantitative and qualitative portrait of the relative mortality burdens of ... COVID-19 and seasonal influenza emerges," they wrote.

Limitations to the data include over- or underreporting of both influenza and COVID-19 deaths, and that it cannot be explicitly proven that COVID-19 is the cause of excess mortality. Also, New York City is obviously not representative of the country as a whole.

Disclosures

Faust and del Rio disclosed no relevant relationships with industry.

Read this article:

COVID-19 No Worse Than the Flu? Hardly - MedPage Today