Deadly COVID-19 Causes More Serious Illnesses Than Flu – Study

Former Director-General of the Ministry of Health, Prof. Yoram Lass, surprised the public when he said that COVID-19 “is a flu with excellent public relations” in March 2020 and expressed his objections to health regulations imposed by the government to reduce the rate of infection. Now it appears that researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston found that Lass was quite mistaken, with the virus being six times more fatal than the flu.

The study compared 1,052 patients with influenza and 582 patients with COVID-19 and found that more people, on average, needed hospital care if infected with the new coronavirus (582) compared to those who suffered from influenza (210). Approximately 30% of those suffering from COVID-19 needed mechanical ventilation, while only 8% of those with the flu needed such treatment. The number of deaths among those suffering from the new coronavirus was much higher, 20%, compared to a 3% mortality rate suffered by people infected with the flu.

In addition, patients with COVID-19, on average, were younger than those suffering from the flu and, when they needed mechanical ventilation, tended to stay in care longer – an average duration of two weeks compared to three days, reported news-medical.net on Friday. COVID-19 patients also reported fewer pre-existing conditions that would require such an intense form of intervention.

Almost all deaths from COVID-19, 98%, were the direct or indirect result of the new coronavirus, wrote Dr. Michael Donnino, one of the authors of the article. He emphasized that this means that people die from COVID-19, not while they own it. This is crucial because, online and during protests, many people have argued that the death rate is supposedly “fabricated” and that hospitals are being encouraged to report false data. The false understanding that COVID-19 is not really the cause of death appears to have originated in a report by the September Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which stated that 6% of COVID-19 deaths listed COVID-19 as the direct and unique cause pointed out by the midaat science portal. This is because death certificates list the chain of events that led to death. A COVID-19 patient who, for the sake of argument, died in a car accident will not be described in the report as having died of the new coronavirus. However, it is considered that a person who died due to an incorrect intubation process has expired from COVID-19, as this is the reason for the treatment. However, the direct cause of death will be listed as defective intubation. The study authors also noted that, without social distance and mask-wearing measures, COVID-19’s mortality rates would have been much higher than what their study showed.

The study was originally published in Journal of General Internal Medicine.

With the exception of a small group of the Israeli public that accepted the COVID-19 conspiracy theories, most Israelis rejected Lass’s theories.