No, not at all. Because covid is just in the earily stages of spreading. At it's best it will kill far more than 50k this year alone and become endemic so it continues to kill at many on top of flu. At its worst it stands to kill a lot more.
Flu kills at most 50,000 people a year. Covid is 10x that. All my life I don't know anyone who's died from the flu, i know multiple people who died from covid. It is like comparing measles to chickenpox. Measles has a very similar mortality rate as covid.
This is certifably false when it comes to covid and the flu:
according to Johns Hopkins University, about 3.1 million people around the world had died of COVID-19 as of April 26, 2021.
The flu, meanwhile, kills between 290,000 to 650,000 people every year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
I'm not saying flu == covid, but since we're all talking about anecdotes, my grandmother technically died of the flu.
12-60k Americans die of the flu every year. So far 160k Americans have died of covid. Unless you've only been alive for a few years it's extremely unlikely you know 4 people that have died from covid and none from the flu...
Sure, but the flu is endemic and strikes every year. In general I think it has killed more than Covid in the US, even if we only take the last 20 years. I'm personally vaccinated and think we should take Covid seriously. My point was just that for the flu, we accept to just let people die. I hope Covid will change that, and that people will start wearing masks and be more careful during flu season.
Thanks for the newsflash, fellow genius. So are you saying that the number of people killed by Covid isn't known, and the number of people killed by flu each year isn't known, so we basically have no valid data and can't compare the two diseases in any meaningful way?
If not, what would you say is a reasonable way to compare them?
Honestly I don't have time to pick apart this entire comment, but just to address the most egregious assumption you make:
You compare death numbers from the flu to COVID.
COVID is a pandemic that is in its exponential growth phase, with zero existing immunity and no existing treatment. The flu is a well-known, well-studied disease for which we have a vaccine, to which many people will have some level of immunity and for which we actually have a treatment. The flu is also at the end of the season right now. COVID is only getting started.
Even if we instituted perfect social distancing and prevented all further spread we can expect COVID deaths to double every few days for the next few weeks because of the incubation period. I am willing to bet good money that the 2k influenza deaths this year will dwindle in comparison to the number of COVID deaths when everything is said and done.
Yes, for the entire population in aggregate. But the flu is deadlier to children than covid. Simplistically and reflexively repeating "covid is not comparable to the flu" obscures this fact to some degree. Not saying you are doing this, but making it verboten to compare the two is a bad practice, in my opinion.
Wow. Regular flu kills around 300-650k people per year worldwide, but in general it only has a 0.1% mortality rate; and guess what, it also only basically kills the elderly.
Now you have a virus with a mortality rate of 2-3%, so it'll kill a lot more people once it begins to spread. The sick people from the coronavirus also needs a lot more medical work and efforts to separate them from the rest of the populace.
So no.
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