1. Compare 13 weeks of flu season to coronavirus - this has exploded within the US in 4 weeks. And 13 weeks might be a bit short; evidently that’s just average, not necessarily a hard set amount of time. but no one here is claiming flu season is supposed to be spread over 365 days.

2. 900,000 seems to be an overestimation (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html). We have yet to see where coronavirus will peak, but it could be higher. 60,000 deaths over 13 weeks is lower than what they’re estimating CV to end up at, with estimations between 100-200k deaths; again, we’ll have to see as no predictive model is perfect.

3. Some recent numbers showed hospitalization rates close to 20% even for younger groups, with rates increasing with age, for coronavirus. Even just got confirmed cases (who are more severely symptomatic), that’s a much higher hospitalization rate when you consider the link I posted above. If you take the high ends of their estimates 810k/45mil = 0.018 hospitalization rate from confirmed cases, a tiny fraction.

4. having the luxury of a full documented flu season without changing numbers and comparing those to an ongoing pandemic just doesn’t quite work.

5. Flu doesn’t require the same amount of PPE that CV does (you generally don’t need n95 for flu patients). Because flu season is predictable, hospitals additionally have more time to collect the PPE and staffing required to meet demand.

So even though flu numbers are higher overall, they are still spread over a greater length of time with far fewer patients requiring hospitalization. Vaccination helps reduce severity even if people still get the flu despite getting it as well.