The corona virus is not like the flu, and ongoing comparisons are misleading, a senior American Heart Association official said Friday.
Covid-19 is new, people have no immunity to it, there is no vaccine to prevent it and there is no good treatment for infections, Dr. Eduardo Sanchez said in comments on the American Heart Association website.
Plus, the new coronavirus is more dangerous in several ways, Sanchez said.
“Covid-19 seems to be more contagious,” he wrote.
“Both of these diseases spread from person to person through respiratory droplets produced when a sick person coughs or sneezes,” he added. “Available information shows that SARS-CoV-2 spreads more efficiently than influenza. It spread easily and continuously, meaning that it moved from person to person without stopping. “
And although there are ongoing references to how many people are killed by seasonal influenza each year, Covid-19 kills more people, faster, said Sanchez, who is the head of the American Heart Association Health Metric and Evaluation Center.
“(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) estimates that 24,000 to 62,000 deaths from flu occur during the 2019-2020 flu season (1 October 2019 to 4 April 2020). This is a wide range because flu is not a disease that can be reported in most regions of the country, and the estimates come from mathematical models based on hospitalization related to flu, “he wrote.
Covid-19 deaths are counted one at a time, Sanchez noted. More than 86,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the US, according to Johns Hopkins University, and they have died within a span of only three months.
“Our understanding of the virus is growing rapidly, but so far, COVID-19 seems to pose a greater risk to public health than the flu,” Sanchez said.
