Neither circle, and not worried, but concerned.

Yes, the seasonal flu kills more, but the hiney flu hasn’t run a full year’s course. Typical flu deaths per year are around 250k to 500k. Current worldwide death toll is 5922, and I have seen projections suggesting a threefold increase in deaths each month. Combine this with the seasonal flu and it could be a pretty bad year. I have not seen any solid numbers on case fatality ratios yet, so we don’t know if this flu is killing more people than a regular flu would. I suspect that it is, but only because of the increased risk of pneumonia.

Some patients go from just being sick to severe pneumonia very fast, and have to be put on ventilators. Right now, if it continues to spread at its current rate, there is a real concern that the US doesn’t have enough ventilators to deal with the high end of projected cases of pneumonia. These patients include young individuals in good health, people who do not normally die from the flu.

This is all cause for concern, but not quite panic. I am most concerned about students who can lose a week or more of classes if they get sick, or the effect on an already weakened economy of an increased number of sick people missing work.

And gx5000, your great grandfather may have been alive in 1918… when the flu killed more than 20 million people, meaning that it killed more people than WWI. That probably would have meant something to him.