President Trump has repeatedly tried to say
that the flu kills tens of thousands of people.
He said, “Who knew the flu killed?”
It actually turns out that his grandfather,
Frederick Trump, died of the flu in this country
at a young age.
But he tried to use it to show, you know,
coronavirus doesn’t even compare.
So talk about both, the language we use and
what it means in comparison with the flu.
Well, COVID-19 is the name of the disease,
not the virus specifically.
And what we’re most concerned about is obviously
the spread of the disease.
Let me talk about the flu.
And the flu is a big killer, and it does infect
many people.
I think we have roughly in the range of 15
million to 20 million in this season alone
in the United States, with a roughly one in
a thousand death rate, so in the range of
15,000 to 20,000 deaths from the flu.
So, a flu is very, very serious.
But that represents roughly 5 to 7% of the
U.S. population.
And the reason it doesn’t represent more
is because both we have flu shots and we have
years, decades of sort of cross-reactive immunity
built up over people who have been exposed
to different virus strains.
The difference with this virus is two.
First of all, no one is immune.
So, in theory, 100% of the population is susceptible
to this virus, or very close to it.
The second part is the fatality rate, either
for people who present to the medical care
system sick enough to go to a doctor or per
infection, which is something different because
not everybody who is infected necessarily
goes to a doctor, looks to be a fair bit higher
than the flu, maybe on the order of five times,
maybe even 10 times higher than the flu.
So we have maybe a much, much larger reservoir
of susceptible people, on the order of 10
to 20 times larger, and we have a fatality
rate that is between five and 10 times larger.
So that’s why the potential for this, even
though we have a tiny fraction of the cases
and deaths right now, why we’re taking the
extreme measures that we are taking.
Now, all that said, a lot — the fatality
rate can be affected by what we do.
And that’s why we’re doing it now, because
the fatality rate is a function both of the
age of the people who are infected but also
of the capability of the medical care system
to take care of them.
So, if we can protect the medical care system
— that is, keep the number of patients coming
in at a rate that they can be cared for, with
adequate ICU beds and ventilators, etc., and
also healthy medical care folks — we can
keep the fatality rate low, or at least lower
than it would have been without that.
