Covid-19 is not the flu. It’s worse.
It’s deadlier, more contagious, and more likely to severely disrupt our health care system. In early March, President Donald Trump tweeted a statistic he said we all should “think about.” It was a comparison of the flu to the current coronavirus pandemic. The flu kills tens of thousands of people a year, he reminded us. At the time, only under a dozen or so people in the US had died of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The tweet read a lot like much of the rhetoric coming out of the White House, which, for weeks now, has been trying to downplay the severity of the situation. A lot of people besides Trump have been comparing the coronavirus to flu. And it’s a question friends and family members who want to know how worried they should be keep asking me: Isn’t this like the flu? So, a quick unambiguous answer: No, this is not like the seasonal flu. It is worse. Put simply, while the exact death rate is not yet clear, this disease k...