Covid now killing less Brits than during a bad flu season shows analysis

Experts in the UK are hoping that the pandemic will become ‘endemic’ after Omicron wave subsides

Analysis carried out by MailOnline suggests that the number of people who are currently dying from Covid is less than half of what the figure would be during a season with bad flu.

At what is being called the peak of the Omicron outbreak, around 130 people are dying every day in England. This time last year, before the big vaccine rollout, that figure was about 1,300 deaths daily.

In fact, despite infection rates almost quadrupling due to the highly transmissible strain, since the start of last autumn, the number of daily deaths has barely changed.
During the last bad flu season in Britain, in 2017/18, Government figures showed that around 400 people were dying each day from influenza at the height of the flu. The previous year, there had been about 300 daily deaths.
A similar scenario unfolded that season, with patients being told to avoid going to A&E, and hospitals having to cancel routine operations. This draws attention to the fact that many are calling for the Government to let British citizens learn to live with Covid.
Just last week, the former chief of the UK’s vaccine task force, Dr Clive Dix, called for Covid to now be treated like the flu, especially since the death rates are similar. The professor also called for an end to mass vaccination, preferring instead to form a strategy to just target those who were vulnerable.
Speaking with MailOnline, another eminent infectious disease expert, Professor Paul Hunter, from the University of East Anglia, said more or less the same as Dr Dix, that Covid and flu are now producing comparable fatality rates. He said he believed that Covid would weaken each year as people develop natural immunity to the virus.
Eventually, as with the flu, only vulnerable people would be affected badly by it he said. “Once we’re past this Omicron peak – excluding another unexpected variant that reverses all of our progress – then we’ll be close to the point of endemic”, added Professor Hunter.

Seasonal influenza is believed to have a case fatality rate – the proportion of confirmed infections that end in death – of around 0.1 per cent. Analysis by MailOnline showed that the case fatality rate with Covid, at the end of December, was about 0.15 per cent. Almost similar results, as reported by dailymail.co.uk.

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