Early in the COVID-19 pandemic there was much wishful, and perhaps to some degree magical thinking crying out that COVID-19 is “no worse than Flu!” Sadly and defying all logic and science, the cry remains prevalent today.
For those that care about numbers a recent pre-print article looks at the experience at one tertiary care center and compares several months of COVID-19 with five, count em’, five years of influenza patients. Bear in mind that this study has yet to undergo peer review but given the straight-forward nature of the comparative data I think it unlikely the results will change after publication.
Beth-Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston looked closely at their COVID-19 patients who were admitted in March and April of 2020 and compared various metrics like ventilator use, vasopressor support (medications that keep heart output and blood pressure from dropping to fatal levels), renal replacement therapy (e.g. dialysis), ICU admission rate and death rate to influenza-positive patients who had been admitted over the previous five years.
From 2014-2019 there were 1052 patients admitted with Influenza. Compare that to 583 COVID-19 positive patients admitted in just the first two months of the pandemic. The average number of flu patients admitted over the typical 8 month season was 210, a total rapidly outstripped by the COVID-19 pandemic. The likelihood of requiring mechanical ventilation for flu patients was 8%, but the likelihood of being placed on a ventilator for patients with COVID-19-related respiratory failure was 31%. Over two months of 2020 174 COVID-19 patients were placed on ventilators compared with a total of only 84 influenza patients over the previous five years combined! The mortality for Influenza patients over the study’s five years was 3% compared with a 20% mortality for COVID-19 patients. Importantly, the percentage of patients without a pre-existing condition was higher for COVID-19 patients (20%) than for Influenza patients (4%) indicating that COVID-19 affects more healthy people than does Influenza.
I’ve posted a number of articles that get to this scientific truth–COVID-19 is more severe and more fatal than influenza. Unless I find particularly compelling data or an ingenious study, I’ll probably not post more on this topic; the data is in and COVID-19 is demonstrably more severe than the flu. Even with overwhelming evidence though, some, plagued by confirmation biases, will continue be data-denialists. They are not new; they have been with us throughout history and sadly they won’t convinced any time soon. You can’t after all, reason a person out of a position they weren’t reasoned into in the first place. To those who value data, this will come as an expected support for a growing mountain of data on COVID-19’s disease burden. The data doesn’t scare us, it informs us and with knowledge, free of dogma or preconceived notions, we will win the war against this very significant threat to human health.
CHRIS DAEL 