COVID-19 isn’t "just a flu,” with a study of hospital patients finding that the virus was still 60% deadlier than influenza last winter.
Greater immunity against the coronavirus, better treatments, and different virus variants lowered COVID-19's mortality risk to about 6% among adults hospitalized in the U.S. last winter from 17%-21% in 2020, researchers at the Clinical Epidemiology Center of the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri found. That was still much higher than the flu’s death rate of 3.7%.
"This finding should be interpreted in the context of a two-to-three times greater number of people being hospitalized for COVID-19 versus influenza in the U.S. in this period,” epidemiologist Ziyad Al-Aly and colleagues wrote in a letter Thursday in the journal JAMA. The research is based on an analysis of electronic health records in databases kept by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which operates the largest nationally integrated health care system in the U.S..