An emergency room physician and professor at Harvard Medical School called for the CDC to reconsider the way it calculates annual flu statistics in an opinion piece published in Scientific American on April 28. The methods used by CDC to estimate yearly flu incidence, which includes reported and unreported cases, produce what Dr. Jeremy Faust called “wildly inflated statistical estimates.” His comments were directed at President Trump and others given to likening the threat posed by the novel coronavirus to that of the annual flu season.
The CDC’s flu estimates, which ranged from 39,000,000 – 56,000,000 cases and 24,000 – 62,000 deaths for the 2019 – 2020 season, are based on complex algorithms and assumptions not supported by sufficient evidence, Dr. Faust asserted. He contended that a more accurate message to communicate to the public would be a comparison between reported COVID-19 deaths and only those influenza deaths that have been confirmed. Using this method, Dr. Faust argued, a clearer picture of the scale of the two phenomena emerges: “if we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.”
Source:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm