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Comment by Gibbon1 | Hacker News Reader

Because it infects cells with the ACE2 receptor covid is never going to be the new influenza. It's going to kill 100-200,000 people a year in the US indefinitely.

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I don't think any responsible medical researcher would claim this. We honestly don't know what the longer term implications of annual COVID are, and the distribution of deaths strongly suggests that the population of people who would die from covid in the US already did, and the remaining population (with the exception of people entering the risk profile) is not as susceptible to extremely bad outcomes.

This is unconscionable. Most groups considered at risk had less than a 10% mortality risk ergo almost all of them are still alive albeit potentially damaged and actually at higher risk.

Covid IFR is below the flu now, after everyone has become vaccinated and after omicron swept through and infected most of the US.

Covid is killing about 150,000 people a year where influenza averages about 30,000.

So no.

IFR means "infection fatality rate". The operative word is rate. So no, you are completely wrong.

You are comparing number of deaths as opposed to rate of death per infection. The number of COVID infections are orders of magnitude higher than the number of flu infections. The rate of death from COVID per infection is now lower than the flu.

https://www.ft.com/content/e26c93a0-90e7-4dec-a796-3e25e94bc...

Isn't it still more contagious though? IFR is only half the equation of total fatalities...

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