The Covid-19 is definitely not a "flu".
A study published in the medical journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Friday, December 18, even shows that the virus kills three times more than the seasonal flu.
The study in question is based on data from more than 135,000 French patients, i.e. 89,530 hospitalized for Covid-19 in March and April 2020 and 45,819 hospitalized for influenza between December 2018 and February 2019.
The death rate of patients with coronavirus was three times higher than that of patients affected by influenza: 16.9% for the former (more than 15,000 deaths out of 89,500 patients) against 5.8% for the latter (more than 2,600 deaths out of 45,800 patients).
"Our study is the largest to date to compare the two diseases and confirms that Covid-19 is much more serious than the flu", comments in a press release one of the authors, Prof. Catherine Quantin of the Dijon University Hospital, researcher at Inserm.
"The fact that the death rate from Covid is three times higher than that of seasonal flu is particularly striking when we consider that the flu of the winter of 2018-2019 was the worst of the last five years in France for the number of deaths, ”she added.
A longer stay in intensive care for Covid patients
The study also shows that patients hospitalized for Covid-19 were more admitted to intensive care / intensive care: 16.3% of them had to be treated in these services reserved for the most serious cases, against 10.8% for those with the flu.
Likewise, the stay in intensive care was longer for Covid patients than for flu patients - two weeks against eight days.
In addition, there have been fewer children and adolescents hospitalized for Covid-19 than for the flu.
This age group represented 1.4% of the total number of patients in the first case and 19.5% in the second.
During the periods selected, the researchers noted three deaths of children under the age of 5 due to Covid-19, and thirteen due to the flu.
All these data were taken from an administrative base, the Program for the medicalization of information systems (PMSI), covering both public and private hospitals.
The authors note, however, a possible limit to their study: the testing policies for influenza are undoubtedly variable from one hospital to another, while those for Covid-19 are more standardized, which can lead to underestimating the number of patients hospitalized for influenza.
In addition, it cannot be said whether the 2018-19 seasonal influenza is representative of all influenza seasons in terms of mortality.
With AFP
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