Good explanation; thank you. How does this comport with the overall/non-age specific fatality rate between the two viruses? Do we have enough data for a confident comparison/contrast?
“How does this comport with the overall/non-age specific fatality rate between the two viruses?”
The short answer to your question is “about 20 times as deadly”.
The best outcome in the world for a large infected population is currently around 1.6% (South Korea). They still have over 40% of their cases unresolved. Since the rate of new cases is lower than the rate of deaths as cases resolve, that 1.6 number will continue to rise. Keep in mind that this result was achieved with massive ongoing mitigation and containment efforts, including exhaustive contact tracing and mass testing. (I wonder, what would the flu rate be if they did this for it?)
That is with the full resources of a whole country and a first-world HCS which did not collapse due to being overwhelmed.
Contrast with Italy, where they basically screwed up every aspect of dealing with this and their formerly best-in-Europe HCS collapsed. They have over 11% fatalities, but they are undercounting both fatalities and cases, so who knows? It’s still an order of magnitude worse than SK.
The common flu has a 0.1% average case fatality rate.
By comparison, the Swine Flu pandemic in the US killed 12,439 people over 15 months (10-15 in the month following the first reported death in the US). CCP-19 has killed 2,955 people in the month following the first reported death.
The common flu, using the high end of the CDC’s (some say inflated) stats, kills fewer people per day, in-season, even in the worst flu years. And we don’t know if CCP-19 even has a season.
So by every measure other than current total annual body count, CCP-19 is much worse than the common flu.