Short answer: its worse.

The following numbers are rough*, but I think make the point the questioner was asking about.

So far in the U.S. there have been an estimated 10.5 million cases of COVID and 240,000 deaths as a result.

Last year it was estimated that in the U.S. around 38 million people got influenza. Of those around 400,000 ended up in the hospital, and around 22,000 people died as a result of the flu.

So that means that 2.3% of those with COVID died, while 0.057% of those with influenza died. That’s a big difference. Again rough numbers. And keep in mind, with flu we’re talking about something that we give a vaccine to hundreds of millions of people, we’ve been treating it for years so we know a bit about what we’re doing, there is some immunity in the population from previous infection, etc. With COVID we have no vaccine (yet), limited experience treating it, and hardly anyone has had it when you consider that if there have been 10 million cases, that means there are 320 million to go in the US.

*Very rough, but I think good enough to get a good idea. Both flu and COVID case and death numbers have a lot of caveats, more than what I want to deal with in this question. One significant caveat is that these COVID numbers are not including cases that are not reported or cases that were not even suspected. Some think this number could be 5-10 times the number of known cases. Additionally, there are also likely more deaths than are represented by this number.

Follow up question - What are the survival rates by age?

Here is a link to the CDC's data on how the cases and deaths break down by demographic factors.

As it relates to your question: when you compare the cases and the deaths between various age groups, only 14-15% of the cases are in those aged over 65, but 80% of the deaths are in that group.

References:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totalcases

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics

https://twitter.com/trvrb?lang=en

The last time I wrote a post here, it was the beginning of June. Michigan, particularly the East side, was coming down from its COVID peak in April and overall things for our state were looking as good as to be expected. Michigan was starting to “reopen” and part of our life returned to normal. But only parts. We still had to deal with masks, which were and are annoying, and we still couldn’t do everything we really wanted to do, like join large groups of people for fun.

At that point in June, depending on where you lived in the state, you might have lost multiple family members or friends to COVID, or you might not have known a single person to have had it. You might have thought it was here to stay forever, or you might have thought it was going to go away on November 4th. Maybe you thought masks didn’t work and never wore them, or maybe you wore them just so you wouldn’t get yelled at. Or you maybe you thought masks worked and wore them religiously.

Then we went through the summer. Michigan, on the whole did pretty well for a lot of the summer.

But now its fall, in fact its closer to winter now than to summer. Schools have been in session for months, both K-12 and higher education. The temperatures have started to get cool. And we’re all sick of not seeing one another, sick of “distancing”, sick of wearing masks. And all these things together have meant that our numbers are going up. This time they’re not just going up in the Detroit area, its all over the state. And the country. And the world.

We are in a much different place than we were in June. As we head into what looks to be a far worse time than what we went through in April, I solicited questions on Facebook to try to get a pulse on what needs answering among my patients. I’m gonna try to pump out answers in the order they arrived, one at a time, every day or so. If you would like to suggest a question, find that thread on facebook, or shoot an email to us.

Do I need a flu shot this year? We’re all wearing masks, do I still need one?

Short answer: Yes.

I suspect that the measures we’re taking for COVID will help curtail our flu season, but not enough for me to skip the flu shot. Right now I am doing everything I can to keep my patients from landing in the urgent care or ER - both because that’s good for them in general, and because right now our hospitals are nearing or at capacity. If you get influenza it looks very much like COVID(remember “flu” is a respiratory bug- not a stomach bug) - so the flu shot is one of those things that can help avoid an ER visit or hospital stay.

And remember - flu shots are not 100% effective. (if they were 100% effective, you wouldn’t need to worry about anyone else taking the shot, your shot would be enough). When you get a flu shot you are helping to form a barrier around those who are most vulnerable to flu - our elderly, our pregnant women, our young children. The more people that take the shot, the stronger that barrier.

Reference: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/