COVID may be no riskier than the flu for many people, some scientists argue :

A pharmacy in New York City offers vaccines for COVID-19 and flu. Some researchers argue that the two diseases may pose similar risks of dying for those infected.

Ted Shaffrey/AP

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Ted Shaffrey/AP

A pharmacy in New York City offers vaccines for COVID-19 and flu. Some researchers argue that the two diseases may pose similar risks of dying for those infected.

Ted Shaffrey/AP

Has COVID-19 become no more dangerous than the flu for most people?

That’s a question that scientists are debating as the country heads into a third pandemic winter. Early in the pandemic, COVID was estimated to be 10 times more lethal than the flu, fueling many people’s fears.

“We have all been questioning, ‘When does COVID look like influenza?”’ says Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. “And, I would say, ‘Yes, we are there.'”

Gandhi and other researchers argue that most people today have enough immunity — gained from vaccination, infection or both — to protect them against getting seriously ill from COVID. And this is especially so since the omicron variant doesn’t appear to make people as sick as earlier strains, Gandhi says.

So unless a more virulent variant emerges, COVID’s menace has diminished considerably for most people, which means that they can go about their daily lives, says Gandhi, “in a way that you used to live with endemic seasonal flu.”

But there’s still plenty of differing views on this topic. While the threat from COVID-19 may be approaching the peril the flu poses, skeptics doubt it’s hit that point yet.

“I’m sorry — I just disagree,” says Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s medical adviser, and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “The severity of one compared to the other is really quite stark. And the potential to kill of one versus the other is really quite stark.”

COVID is still killing hundreds of people every day, which means more than 125,000 additional COVID deaths could occur over the next 12 month if deaths continue at that pace, Fauci notes. COVID has already killed more than 1 million Americans and it was the third leading cause of death in 2021.

A bad flu season kills about 50,000 people.

“COVID is a much more serious public health issue than is influenza,” Fauci says, noting this is especially true for older people, the group at the highest risk dying from the disease.

Debating the way deaths are counted

The debate over COVID’s mortality rate hinges on what counts as a COVID death. Gandhi and other researchers argue that the daily death toll attributed to COVID is exaggerated because many deaths blamed on the disease are actually from other causes. Some of the people who died for other reasons happened to also test positive for the coronavirus.

“We are now seeing consistently that more than 70% of our COVID hospitalizations are in that category,” says Dr. Shira Doron, an infectious disease specialist and professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. “If you’re counting them all as hospitalizations, and then those people die and you count them all as COVID deaths, you are pretty dramatically overcounting.”

If deaths were classified more accurately, than the daily death toll would be closer to the toll the flu takes during a typical season, Doron says. If this is true, the odds of a person dying if they get a COVID infection — what’s called the case fatality rate — would be about the same as the flu now, which is estimated to be around 0.1%, or perhaps even lower.

In a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Thursday, researchers attempted to filter out other deaths to analyze mortality rates for people hospitalized “primarily for COVID-19.” They find the death rate has dropped significantly in the omicron era, compared to the delta period.

But Fauci argues that it’s difficult to distinguish between deaths that are caused “because of” COVID and those “with” COVID. The disease has been found to put stress on many systems of the body.

“What’s the difference with someone who has mild congestive heart failure, goes into the hospital and gets COVID, and then dies from profound congestive heart failure?” he asks. “Is that with COVID or because of COVID? COVID certainly contributed to it.”

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