Note that these numbers are very different from the CDC’s final official flu death estimates. For 2018-2019, for instance, the 7,172 confirmed flu deaths translated to a final estimate of between 26,339 and 52,664 deaths. That’s because the CDC plugs the confirmed deaths into a model to adjust for what epidemiologists believe is a severe undercount.

Then lets add a bar for this season’s non-adjusted and directly observed COVID-19 deaths, which stand at 63,259:

There are not likely to be many more flu deaths, as we are past the worst of the flu season. But COVID-19 mortality continues to rise at a rate of about 2,000 deaths per day.

Using an apples-to-apples comparison, we can say that the coronavirus has already killed eight times as many people as the flu in 2019-2020.

The coronavirus, Faust writes, “is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.”