Covid-19 remains a worse killer than the flu, US study finds
- Covid-19 carries a 35 per cent higher risk of death in hospital patients, study finds
- Researcher says we still need to take Covid-19 seriously, despite pandemic being over
Covid-19 remained a bigger killer than the flu last winter, despite hopes the pandemic virus would eventually blend into the background with other respiratory germs that cause seasonal epidemics, a US study showed.
Patients hospitalised for Covid-19 had a 35 per cent higher risk of dying within 30 days than influenza patients, Ziyad Al-Aly and colleagues at the clinical epidemiology centre of the Veterans Affairs St Louis Health Care System in Missouri found.
Covid posed a 60 per cent higher mortality risk than flu in hospitalised patients during the 2022-2023 season, the same researchers showed last year.
The findings, published Wednesday in JAMA, should be interpreted in the context of nearly twice as many hospitalisations for Covid-19 compared with seasonal flu from October 2023 to March 2024, they said.
Although the death rate among Covid-19 patients declined to 5.7 per cent in that period from 6 per cent a year earlier, the study indicates that Covid-19’s propensity to cause more damage outside the lungs still makes it a more dangerous pathogen, even as immunity to the virus builds.
“We did the 2024 Covid-versus-flu rematch thinking that we may find that risk of death in Covid may have sufficiently declined to become equal with the risk of death from flu,” Al-Aly told Bloomberg. “But the reality remains that Covid carries a higher risk of death than the flu.”