Once again, misleading comparisons between the flu and Covid-19 caught widespread attention across the internet.
“Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu,” President Donald Trump tweeted. “Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!”
That’s not true. Covid-19 is more lethal than the seasonal flu.
- The novel coronavirus has killed more than 210,700 people in the US in eight months, according to Johns Hopkins University.
- That’s an average of more than 867 Covid-19 deaths a day in the US since the first known death on February 6.
- The flu killed an estimated 22,000 people in the US during the last flu season, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the “exact timing and duration of flu seasons can vary,” the CDC says, most cases happen between October and May.
- If 22,000 people died between October 1 and May 31, that would be an average of about 91 flu deaths a day over the span of eight months.
And in just eight months, Covid-19 has killed more people than the flu did during the last five flu seasons combined.
Read more about why Covid-19 is more dangerous than the flu — and why extra precautions are needed: