Especially when the pandemic was in its early phases, many drew dishonest comparisons between it and H1N1 or the flu season.
Laboratory-confirmed fatalities:
Swine Flu globally (April 2009-April 2010) 18 631
Covid this far: 119 692
Flu on spring 2019, USA: 5487
Covid: 23 644
Laboratory-confirmed fatalities:
Swine Flu globally (April 2009-April 2010) 18 631
Covid this far: 119 692
Flu on spring 2019, USA: 5487
Covid: 23 644
There are several problems with people comparing these diseases. The most common is to compare apples to oranges: statistical estimates of flu deaths to laboratory-confirmed deaths from covid. Estimates of total deaths are always much higher than laboratory-confirmed deaths.
Second of all, people ignore time-scale. What the Swine flu did in over a year to what covid does within a few weeks is just not comparable. Same goes for comparing an entire years influenza deaths to covid deaths from a much shorter period of time.
And one thing I've noticed people spin conspiracy theories around is how covid-fatalities are counted, when the way of recording them is completely normal for an infectious disease. For example, the influenza stats from CDC mean statistical estimates for cases of so-called ILI.
ILI goes for influenza-like illness. So it doesn't mean the amount of people tested positive for A-virus. They gather data about cases with influenza-symptoms, such as non-bacterial pneumonia, and estimate from there. There's nothing unusual about the method covid is recorded.
And one more thing people ignore: Influenza is something familiar to humans, we've faced pandemics for it for a long time, so there's some immunity for it already. But the new coronavirus is something we're facing the first time, so there's no existing immunity for it.
