The Great Covid-19 Versus Flu Comparison Revisited
A consensus is emerging on how deadly the coronavirus really is. But comparing it with past influenza pandemics turns out to be harder than it looks.
There’s no debating, this is serious.
Photographer: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
After much back and forth in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, a consensus is emerging that the overall risk of dying for those infected with the disease — at least so far, in a population with an age distribution roughly similar to that of the U.S. or Europe — is about 6 or 7 in 1,000. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention upwardly revised its “best estimate” of the fatality rate in July to 0.65% from 0.26%. An occasionally updated “meta-analysis” by Australian researchers Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and Lea Merone of all relevant studies on the disease has it at 0.68%.
This isn’t much below the approximately 1% estimated in a Feb. 10 study by the Covid-19 disease-modeling group at Imperial College London, which was adopted as a provisional consensus by many in the epidemiology and public health communities. It’s also within the range of 0.05% to 1% proposed in a March 17 op-ed article by Stanford Medical School professor John Ioannidis, although at the time the skeptical Ioannidis intimated that the true fatality rate was likely to come out toward the low end.