ZFirst of all, the good news: The risk of dying from Covid-19 despite intensive treatment has fallen massively in the past three years. In the first year of the pandemic, mortality was five to six times higher within the first month after admission to a hospital. This direct comparison is permissible at least for men of advanced age after evaluating the well-documented veteran studies from the USA.
This is now being observed around the world in a similar way: the risk of death from Covid-19 has fallen sharply, especially among vulnerable people – thanks to widespread and often better immunity after vaccination or infection and thanks to new medicines and advances in care. And yet the danger to life and limb is obviously anything but negligible, in any case there is significantly more than a residual risk. This is shown by the latest comparison of veterans’ data with the risk of death from the flu virus, which is already not low for older people.
Proportion of deceased almost twice as high
In a study by epidemiologists from the Saint Louis Health Care System in the US state of Missouri, which recorded almost 9,000 Covid 19 sufferers and 2,400 influenza patients a month after hospitalization between October 2022 and the end of January 2023, the risk of death for corona patients was in This time, despite significant vaccination progress, the risk of death in influenza patients is one and a half to twice as high. In figures: 538 – almost six percent – of the hospitalized Covid-19 infected people died, while 76 (3.2 percent) of the influenza patients did not survive the viral disease.
More than 95 percent of the patients were men, mostly very old. The average age was 73 years. However, every fourth hospitalized Covid 19 patient was under 65 years of age, and every fifth patient with the flu was younger than 65. A clear trend can be seen from the vaccination protection of the patients: Above all, those who had been boosted or had already been vaccinated twice Patients had a higher chance of surviving the disease. In contrast, the immune status hardly played a role in those who had been vaccinated against the flu. The 134 patients who had contracted both pathogens at the same time or in quick succession and became ill during the study period were excluded from the study presented in the current issue of the specialist journal “JAMA” in order to be able to better compare the consequences of the two different infectious diseases.