COVID-19 worse than Spanish flu for NYC
A new study compares deaths during two key months of the pandemics.
The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which claimed an estimated 50 million lives worldwide, stands as the most frequent point of comparison to the coronavirus scourge.
In some ways, according to a new study, the COVID-19 pandemic has been worse.
The study, published Thursday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, compares the two months since the first recorded death of COVID-19 in New York City – the epicenter of the U.S. epidemic for weeks – with the deadliest two months of the 1918 calamity.
Although the number of New Yorkers per 100,000 who died monthly was higher at the time – 287, significantly more than the average of 202 from March 11 to May 11 of this year – the deviation from the norm in 2020 is considerably higher.
About 100 New Yorkers per 100,000 died of all causes every month in the four years before the Spanish flu, a figure that nearly tripled in October and November of 1918, the peak of the pandemic in the city. This time around – with more advanced medical care and public health systems bringing fatalities down to 50 a month per 100,000 during the same March-to-May dates the previous three years – the number of deaths quadrupled.
That puts in stark terms the impact of a disease some still downplay in part because about 40% of those infected might not develop symptoms.
“They’re comparable events in terms of magnitude,’’ said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and lead author of the study.
“I think maybe we imagine pandemics and plagues and other calamities to be this sort of historical events where the streets are lined with dead bodies and there’s pestilence and filth, but what our numbers show is that what happened in New York was pretty similar to what happened in the greatest modern pandemic.”
The coronavirus has infected nearly 5.2 million Americans and killed more than 165,000 in just seven months. An estimated 675,000 Americans died in the Spanish flu pandemic.
Faust acknowledges his report represents a case study that’s not necessarily applicable to other cities or the rest of the nation. That remains to be seen as the coronavirus continues to spread and disrupt life across the country.