Francois Balloux is the Director of the UCL Genetics Institute,[1] and a Professor of Computational Systems Biology at University College London. Together with his colleague Dr Lucy Van Dorp, they led a team of researchers in the analysis of the first large-scale analysis of 7666 complete SARS-Cov-2 genomes, the agent of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Balloux recently compared the Covid 19 pandemic of 2020 to the 1957 flu. I was just a little tyke at that time and don't remember anything about it. But if you read articles about it, apparently the world did not go into a frenzy of panic. Life went on. Maybe we were tougher then.
Infection Fatality Rate
1957 Flu 0.67%
2020 Covid 0.65% (CDC number)
Stats for both for the whole World, UK and USA with deaths per million. Balloux estimates total deaths for USA will be 220,000, we are at 148,462 today. Deaths per day in USA are currently about 1000 per day, I think this will start going down in a month if this new surge of cases gets us to herd immunity threshold. We'll see.
Deaths per million are very similar for both diseases in UK and USA, but the 57 flu killed a lot more people per capita in the world than covid 19 has so far. Covid 19 would need to kill about 3 million people worldwide to equal the deaths per million rate of 57 flu. (current world total is 641,889) If the low herd immunity threshold theory is correct I doubt this will happen, as there are many places in the world that seem to have reached it. We'll see.
