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Covid-19 is not the flu. It’s worse.
Put simply, while the
exact death rate is not yet clear, this disease kills a larger proportion of people than the flu (and it’s
particularly lethal for people older than 80).
A comparison of flu death rates to Covid-19 deaths in China in the period leading up to the peak of the country’s outbreak. The exact fatality rate of Covid-19 is not yet known, but it appears much deadlier than the flu.
Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie/Our World in Data
''It also has a higher potential to
overwhelm our health care system and hurt people with other illnesses.
At present, there is also no
vaccine to combat it, nor any approved therapeutics to slow the course of its toll on the human body. (Doctors can treat
cytokine storm syndrome, an immune response that may in some cases be dealing the fatal blow to those dying of Covid-19.)
Sober-minded epidemiologists say, without exaggeration, that 20 to 60 percent of the world’s adult population could end up
catching this virus.''
''Biologically, it behaves differently than the flu. It takes around five days for Covid-19 infection to develop symptoms. For the flu, it’s two days. That potentially gives people more time to spread the illness asymptomatically before they know they are sick.''
''Three months ago, this virus was not known to science. No human immune system had seen it before January, so no unexposed human has any natural immunity to it. That means it’s more contagious than the flu — about twice as contagious, perhaps more; the numbers are still being worked out.''
'People have been trying to underplay this': Why the coronavirus is different from the flu
''Experts are still trying to calculate precisely what the mortality rate of the coronavirus is, but it appears to be many times higher than that of the flu.
"If you get the flu, 99.9 percent of people are going to be just fine."
''While the flu follows a distinct seasonal pattern every year, no one knows yet what the coronavirus pattern will look like.''
''Efforts to
develop a vaccine for it are underway, but nothing exists to prevent it at the moment. With the flu, a
vaccine is manufactured each year to keep up with the constantly mutating genes of the flu strains. Those who catch the flu have
some immunity against catching the same strain again — something that is not yet possible with the coronavirus.''