Today I would like to make some comparisons between COVID-19 and Influenza. For simplicity, we will look at data from the Southern Nevada Health District, which serves Las Vegas and surrounding communities.
This page will give you SNHD’s flu reports. Flu season is generally considered to run from October to March or April here. Let’s call it 6 months. Please note that when they refer to the week number, they mean for the year. So the first week of January is week 1. It is true that we never know exactly how many cases of the flu there are (the CDC estimates tens of millions of cases and tens of thousands of deaths nationwide). That’s because a lot of people recover at home without tests or hospital visits. However, if you look at the latest report, you’ll see that 47 people died of the flu this flu season. This number is pretty close to accurate; someone is either dead or they are not.
Now let’s move over to SNHD’s COVID-19 reporting. Just a reminder, COVID-19 is short for Coronavirus Disease 2019, it’s not the 19th anything. More about the basics here, but back to SNHD. We reported our first case March 5th, then our first death on the 16th. As of April 29th, we have 3979 confirmed cases. This needs to be treated as a minimum, because there simply hasn’t been enough testing. A lot of people are walking around with mild symptoms or none at all, blissfully unaware that they are spreading disease. Again, despite the lack of testing, there’s another number that is less prone to distortion.
The fact I want to point out is that as of April 29, Southern Nevada has had 202 deaths from COVID-19. In 6 weeks, 202 COVID-19 deaths, compared to 47 influenza deaths due to influenza in 6 months. Same population. Same location. Same risk factors. That’s four times as many deaths in about a quarter of the time.
In a nutshell, that is why we need to take this thing seriously.
I have become aware of voices on the Internet saying we shouldn’t waste time on a vaccine, but go for a cure. I would like to remind those folks that we never did get a cure for measles, polio, or rabies, just a vaccine. Even tuberculosis had a vaccine decades before we had a cure.
Stay safe out there. Wash your hands. Don’t stand too close to other people. Wear your mask in public. And remember that the economy is meaningless if you’re dead.