You probably have friends who are still getting together for poker nights because they don’t think the coronavirus pandemic is really the once-in-a-century threat to human life and health that it’s being treated as. Maybe you, yourself, think that the current shutdown of the economy is a gross overreaction — or perhaps something more sinister.
After all, more people die of the flu every year in the United States than have died of the coronavirus this year — as of this writing, the U.S. coronavirus death toll is 6,803, about one-fifth of the death total of the flu last year.
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So we can either wait for that coronavirus death toll to double three more times in two weeks, and thus convince the doubters by surpassing the worst-ever flu death total, or we can take it seriously right now.
If you’re still unconvinced, or know someone you’d like to convince, this one fact ought to make things clear: In New York state, more people were admitted to the hospital with the coronavirus last week than have ever been admitted in a single week with the flu — by a factor of five.
These numbers are COVIDTracking.com and New York State’s Department of Health. Let’s slice this data a couple of different ways:
More people (2,879) were admitted to New York hospitals for coronavirus in one day (April 3) than were ever admitted to New York Hospitals in a whole week (2,500) for flu.
More people (13,642) were admitted to the hospital for coronavirus over the past seven days than were admittted for flu in the worst month in New York State history (~10,000).
The winter of 2017-2018 was a particularly bad flu season in New York, with 23,337 people admitted to the hospital over the course of the whole season. More than 10% of those, almost 2,500, were admitted in the week ending Feb. 3, 2018. That’s the highest number of new flu hospitalizations I can find in a single week in New York.
Compare that to coronavirus admissions this past week. From Saturday, March 28, to Friday, April 3, more than 13,000 new patients were hospitalized in New York state with the coronavirus, according to data assembled by COVIDtracking.com. So in New York State, measured in terms of hospitalizations, the coronavirus last week was more than five times worse than the worst flu week ever.
That tells you that this disease spreads far more rapidly and sickens more people more severely than the worst flu. These numbers show you why hospitals are overflowing and why nurses and doctors are running out of masks, ventilators, and other needed equipment.
This should make you worry about what hospitals in your state will be like soon. It should make you worry about what death rates will look like soon.
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UPDATE: This post was updated at 9:35 am on Saturday April 4, to include April 3 numbers, add a chart, and add more context.
