Covid-19 Has Become Less Deadly, but That Could Change as

Cases rise:

“ The coronavirus is now killing around 0.6% of people it infects, an improvement from April, when the death rate was about 0.9%, says the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious-disease modeler at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, says the current death rate could be even lower than that, at roughly 0.15%. The death rate of seasonal influenza is 0.1%, based on data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-has-become-less-deadly-but-that-could-change-as-cases-rise-11606213802?mod=mhp

Amazing to think that this disease might end up with a 0.15% fatality rate. Very excited by all the recent announcements about potential vaccines.

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Nov 24, 2020, 3:32 PM

To get .15% means 166 million Americans would have already had covid. Today. But beside the unknown asymptomatic people.....because oddly it's never been seriously studied.....in the US.......

2018-2019 flu season - 34,000 Americans died from the flu. An average year, slightly above. Anywhere from 12,000 to 60,000 Americans die from the flu each year.

If you add up all the flu deaths since 2013 in the US (7 years), you get roughly the past 7.5 months of covid deaths. It is easily the third leading cause of death in the United States this year. Flu has not been the third leading cause of death in the US in my lifetime. The difference is even much more stark in the state of SC. The 2017-18 flu season was one of our worst in SC in years. 289 people die from influenza that year, well above average for the state. We've had roughly 4,300 covid deaths in SC this year. We're well north of 20 average flu seasons/years worth of deaths from covid. In the 2017-18 flu season there were 4,400 hospitalizations for the flu. We're up to 11,600 for covid so far.