Q: Is COVID-19 just a bad flu?

Here we inspect the question based on the overall death toll of United States (Source). Generally speaking, the confirmation of death is quite straight forward. The numbers below include the deaths of all causes, i.e. heart attack, cancer, influenza, car accidents, etc.

	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020
Death Toll	2,744,248	2,813,503	2,839,205	2,854,838	3,358,814

Even when the numbers are big and y-axis begins from zero, one could easily notice the obvious uprise in 2020.

Based on the statistics alone, we may conclude that something deadly must have happened in 2020.

Unless there are some hideous huge disasters that happened in 2020, which is overlooked by every one in the country, COVID19 related deaths would best match this number abnormality so far.

How About Flu

CDC reports (Source) also provided detailed information of death cases by flu. Here are the death cases per 100,000 standard population, of each year for all causes vs influenza.

	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020
Deaths per 100,000	728.8	731.9	723.6	715.2	828.7
Deaths due to influenza and pneumonia per 100,000	13.5	14.3	14.9	12.3

Flu data of 2020 is not yet available. Yet, we could still see that, the flu related cases will hardly impact the total death toll in a significant way.

References:

CDC: Mortality in the United States, 2016
CDC: Mortality in the United States, 2017
CDC: Mortality in the United States, 2018
CDC: Mortality in the United States, 2019
CDC: Provisional Mortality Data — United States, 2020