“We have all been questioning, ‘When does COVID look like influenza?’ ” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco told NPR. “And, I would say, ‘Yes, we are there.’
“So unless a more virulent variant emerges, COVID’s menace has diminished considerably for most people, which means that they can go about their daily lives,” says Gandhi, “in a way that you used to live with endemic seasonal flu.”
“We are now seeing consistently that more than 70% of our COVID hospitalizations are in that category,” says Dr. Shira Doron, an infectious disease specialist at the Tufts Medical Center and a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine. “If you’re counting them all as hospitalizations, and then those people die and you count them all as COVID deaths, you are pretty dramatically overcounting.”
“If deaths were classified more accurately, then the daily death toll would be closer to the toll the flu takes during a typical season,” Doron says. “If this is true, the odds of a person dying if they get a COVID infection — what’s called the case fatality rate — would be about the same as the flu now, which is estimated to be around 0.1%, or perhaps even lower.”
