It'll be worth checking back in a few weeks and see how flu compares to COVID-19 then.
Washington has had ~75 flu deaths since October, and the season is starting to level off. In that time, there have been 51 outbreaks in long-term care facilities. The overall mortality rate for flu in Washington is about 1 per 100,000 cases (0.001%) per the state
Health Department.
In WA, COVID-19 is a few weeks ahead of NY, with cases circulating for 4-6 weeks depending on who you ask. There have been 22 deaths over 162 confirmed cases* so far, many from a single outbreak in a long-term care facility. The spokesperson for that facility said that several patients went from no symptoms to death in a matter of hours. There are several other long-term care facilities that have at least one confirmed positive test among residents or staff. Rough estimates are that there are a couple of thousand COVID-19 infections in WA, most undetected.
COVID-19 appears to be at least one or two orders of magnitude more deadly than flu, and perhaps more infectious. If cases at two or three of the long-term care facilities with current infections blow up like the one in Kirkland did, we will pass the absolute number of flu deaths in a week or two. If (global outside of China) infection trends continue in WA (~15% increase in infections each day) and the WHO mortality rate around 3% holds, we'll be looking at passing the flu in total number of deaths in a couple of weeks.
I'm not saying that we all need to run in circles screaming and shouting over COVID-9, but it is definitely worse than the flu and we definitely need to take it seriously. Anything we can do to lower that 15% number will save a lot of lives. And that's before we even get to the really terrifying scenarios where hospitals get overloaded and medical care breaks down.
* Note that testing in WA is basically confined to people who have been hospitalized so far. There has not been widespread testing available to people with some symptoms but not severe enough to admit to a hospital.
