President Donald Trump held a briefing at the White House to reassure
people that there was little chance of the virus causing significant
disruption in the United States.
“I want you to understand something that shocked me when I saw it,” he
said. “The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000
people a year. That was shocking to me.”
His point was to suggest that the coronavirus was no worse than the flu,
whose toll of deaths most of us apparently barely noticed.
I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other
emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple
question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most
of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their
careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having
the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we
have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical
experience.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/?fbclid=IwAR0FlEfP_27iuWZi6RO-se1I3nG8PPJ_tqDDKofKumEQSVraIg25kypiuqw