Covid-19 remains a worse cause of death than the flu, according to American research

Covid-19 remained a bigger killer than the flu last winter, despite hopes that the pandemic virus would eventually fade into the background with other respiratory pathogens that cause seasonal epidemics, a US study found.

Patients hospitalized for Covid-19 had a 35 percent higher risk of dying within 30 days than flu patients, Ziyad Al-Aly and colleagues at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System Clinical Epidemiology Center found in Missouri.

Covid posed a 60 percent higher mortality risk than flu in hospitalized patients during the 2022-2023 season, the same researchers showed last year.

The findings, published Wednesday in JAMA, should be interpreted in the context of nearly twice as many hospitalizations for Covid-19 compared to seasonal flu from October 2023 to March 2024, they said.

Although the death rate among Covid-19 patients fell to 5.7 percent in that period from 6 percent a year earlier, the research indicates that Covid-19’s tendency to cause more damage outside the lungs still makes it a more dangerous pathogen, even if immunity against the virus is built up.

“We did the Covid-flu rematch in 2024 thinking that we might find that the risk of death from Covid has decreased enough to become equal to the risk of death from flu,” Al-Aly told Bloomberg. “But the reality remains that Covid carries a greater risk of death than the flu.”

The findings were based on an analysis of electronic medical records of U.S. veterans in all 50 states. Although most Veterans Affairs users are older, white men, the data includes hundreds of female and non-white patients.

Patients with Covid-19 or flu who were hospitalized for any other reason – or those hospitalized for both diseases – were excluded from the study.

Among Covid-19 patients, there was no significant difference in the risk of dying before and during the period when JN.1 was predominant around Christmas 2023, suggesting that the Omicron subvariant may not have a materially different severity profile than the subvariants that immediately preceded it. , the researchers said.

“Overall, I think this means we still need to take Covid seriously,” Al-Aly said. “To downplay it as an insignificant ‘cold’, as we often hear, is inconsistent and inconsistent with reality.”