Hacker News Reader

Comment by ascii_only | Hacker News Reader

How many people die each year from flu worldwide? How many times mortality of Covid-19 is bigger?

Mortality rate for COVID-19 is about 2-3% with medical care, and maybe 10% without. For common flu it's roughly 0.1% depends on when and where of the outbreak.

2-3% of confirmed cases or total estimated cases, including mild and asymptomatic cases that aren't reported?

Most mild cases are reported as they perform temperature check for everyone who enters and exit most if not all enclosures, so unless those people self-quarantined and never go out, they are likely be included in the statistics.

Asymptomatic cases are extremely rare, if they infects multiple others, they will likely be identified through retrospection. Overall, I'd say those cases are unlikely to result in significant difference in the estimate.

Not sure if it makes sense worldwide given that there are a lot of 3rd world countries, but in US the flu has a mortality rate 2 orders of magnitude less than covid-19.

According to the CDC, "between 291,000 and 646,000 people worldwide die from seasonal influenza-related respiratory illnesses each year" [1].

This is likely exacerbated by many countries not having ready access to flu vaccines and/or proper hospitalization for those that need it.

Compare this to America-specific numbers, where 34,000,000 – 49,000,000 Americans catch a flu-related illness each year, yet only 20,000 – 52,000 result in death [2].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1213-flu-death-esti...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

I misread parent comment but this was exactly my point. A lot of people die from flu although there is vaccine and mortality rate is at least one magnitude lower than Covid-19 and hospitals are not overwhelmed.

I don't follow. Per the CDC link, seasonal flu hospitalizations result from 1.0% to 1.5% of flu infections. COVID-19 is currently at about 20%. That's a significantly higher hospital load for COVID-18 than for seasonal flu.

With season flu hospitals are not overwhelmed but with covid-19 they probably will be so even more people will die.

Yes, so with the same numbers that catch covid it would be 2-5 millions US deaths.

A 10% death rate?

"Yes, so with the same numbers that catch covid it would be 2-5 millions US deaths."

So, 1.3-1.9 million US deaths.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com