July 9, 2020: It's Not Just Like the Flu, Actually -- Deaths from COVID-19 vs the Seasonal Flu

Here are the CDC numbers for deaths from seasonal flu, and from COVID-19. Flu numbers are for the 2018-19 flu season. COVID-19 numbers are from 2/2/20 through 7/4/20, as recorded by 7/8/20.  The most recent weeks are incomplete. (You have probably seen much higher death numbers through July 8, but the CDC's numbers lag those on the ground in various states, and it takes them a while to compile things like breakdowns by age, gender, race, etc. So their most-recent weeks are always low.)

I crunched the numbers a whole lot to get the totals for COVID-19. The CDC breaks them down by week, and by age group within each week, but does not give a running total (at least, not on this particular site). So I compiled it from all the weeks, subtotalling into two counts:  65 and over, or 64 and younger, at time of death. Feel free to download and re-crunch if you have doubts. 

This project happened because a friend inquired about some bad numbers he'd seen coming out of Fox News. Turned out, on inspection, that the "expert" spouting off over there couldn't tell the difference between a mortality rate of 4% and .04%  It's only a one-hundredfold difference, after all.

So that turned out to be a whole different problem, needing a whole different analysis, which I do not have. But it was worth it, finding these totals.

Why can't I calculate a mortality rate, you ask? Well, the CDC estimates that there were 35 million cases of flu last season, and that there have been about 3 million cases of COVID-19 so far.  So there were about ten times more cases of flu last year than there have been of C19 this year. And there have been three times as many deaths from C19 than there were from flu. 

But the C19 number of actual (as opposed to confirmed) CASES is disputed.  How many cases of C19 are, or were, out there, that were never confirmed? No one knows! 

At first, there were tests only for the very sickest. To this day, testing varies widely by location, and general testing of representative slices of the population, which might tell us how many asymptomatic cases are out there, isn't happening. 

So the mortality RATE is anybody's guess. Even the mortality COUNT (above) may be off, for various reasons. But it's probably in the ballpark of reality, and by that count, about three times as many people have died of COVID-19 this year than died of influenza in the 2018-19 season.