Covid-19 remained a bigger killer than the flu last winter, despite hopes the pandemic virus would eventually blend into the background with other respiratory germs that cause seasonal epidemics, a US study showed.
Patients hospitalized for Covid had a 35% higher risk of dying within 30 days than influenza patients, Ziyad Al-Aly and colleagues at the clinical epidemiology center of the Veterans Affairs St Louis Health Care System in Missouri found. Covid posed a 60% higher mortality risk than flu in hospitalized patients during the 2022-2023 season, the same researchers showed last year.
Funding studies on completely magical thinking now. It's still amazing how heavy handed all the narrative spinning was. "Viruses get less virulent over time" some reddit comment says, half remembering something that applies to viruses that kill their hosts before they can be transmitted. And somehow that becomes the public consciousness in a world that's had HIV for 50 years. Of course covid is more deadly than the flu.
And of course no mention of long covid, which is the bigger issue.
Each COVID strain was more contagious than the last with no reduction in lethality and they stuck their heads in the sand