Keep in mind that the stats I linked are specific to my county here in Texas and should not be extrapolated to the rest of the country.
The specific stats that are important to track out of all that (if you want to figure out what’s going on at a glance) are ICU admittance (because you just *don’t* get admitted to ICU unless it really is serious, unlike general hospital admission), lab-verified ICU admitted COVID-19 cases, ICU bed availability and lab-verified COVID-19 deaths.
For Dallas County, the lab-confirmed COVID-19 ICU admittances (note that Dallas breaks out suspected versus confirmed) exceeded peak 2018-2019 flu season ICU admittances months back. Deaths have also exceeded 2018-2019 flu fatalities, albeit not by gigantic margins. So, **in Dallas County,** it has demonstrably been worse than the average flu. However, it hasn’t been the 1918 Spanish flu yet, nor are we seeing the disaster NYC is showing. BLM ‘protests’ nee riots didn’t really get widespread in Dallas either, so the related spikes aren’t as bad as Houston (to name one example).
Re: “Texas COVID deaths have also exceeded 2018-2019 flu fatalities”
However, compared to the 2017-2018 flu season, COVID is far behind the Texas flu fatalities.
Texas - 2017-18 Influenza Deaths - 3,516
Texas - 2018 COVID Deaths - 2,416