Here is one way Covid is not like the flu. In its first year, the new virus infected an estimated 100 million Americans, five times as many as are infected by the flu in an average year. Our countermeasures don’t seem to have slowed Covid at all but they did slow the flu. A medium-severe flu season came to a screeching halt, with cases dropping dramatically after March 2020 apparently due to social-distancing measures adopted for Covid.
The effect was even clearer in year two. It was also world-wide. Uniquely the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t even bother to estimate an annual “disease burden of the flu” for the 2020-21 season given “minimal influenza activity.” Covid, meanwhile, was so out of control that as many Americans died in year two as in year one despite widespread vaccination. How many were infected (or reinfected) in year two? Nobody knows. One study found that by December 2021 half of Americans claimed to have had Covid. Keep in mind perhaps one-third of cases are asymptomatic.
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