OP-ED COMPARING INFLUENZA & COVID NUMBERS AND MORTALITY
Provider Health
5
***Caveat - this is me doing math & making a lot of assumptions that I tried to describe. Take it with a grain of salt.***
Provided by: Lauren Fine, MD
Annually, about 10% of the US becomes sick with influenza. In the 2018-2019 flu season, that meant about 35.5 million people had the flu. Of those, approximately 34,000 people died - producing a case fatality rate of 0.1%. Currently the case fatality rate of COVID-19 in the US is 5.7%: 57 times the case fatality rate of influenza. Now, we expect that because so many asymptomatic and minimally ill people are not being tested, that the case fatality rate is actually much lower than 5.7%. Many estimate that we are undercounting the number of COVID cases by about 10 times. If that assumption is correct, then the case fatality rate of COVID-19 is closer to 0.5%, making COVID-19 about five times more deadly than the flu. Although we are early in the pandemic, 90,694 Americans have already lost their lives to COVID-19- about three times as many people who died from influenza one flu season ago. If somehow only 10% of the US population managed to become infected with COVID-19, about 177,500 Americans would die. Unfortunately, in order to achieve herd immunity, most estimates say that 70-90% of the population must be immune to the disease. Immunity can be achieved either by vaccination or by surviving infection (we believe). So - in the absence of a vaccine - how many Americans would have to die before we achieved this elusive herd immunity? Probably about 1.3 million people. Take home message? If we must get herd immunity without a vaccine, the human cost to our country will be immense.
A good article that shows the how infection fatality rate (IFR) for SARS-CoV-2 is calculated can be found below. One of the challenges is that it is hard to get a true denominator of infected individuals as there is not universal testing, there is inaccuracies in testing, and asymptomatic individuals. Also, there can be inaccuracy in the numerator (deaths) due to attributing deaths to other factors than COVID-19 (or vice-versa) and due to social isolation.
Click Here to view the full article, "Estimating The Infection Fatality Rate Among Symptomatic COVID19 Cases In The United States," By Anirban Basu.
Resources, Questions or Concerns Related to COVID-19? Contact the IES COVID Helpdesk
[email protected] | 469.420.5590 | Click Here for Resources