Yes. Current understanding of the mortality rate is that it’s roughly 10x more lethal than the flu across all age demographics. This means you might only have a 0.2% of dying as a 20 year old, but you only had a 0.02% chance of dying of the flu.

The caveat is that mortality rate is intimately tied with the availability of certain types of care; if you need a vent and the hospital is full, you die even if otherwise you would’ve lived. Thus case mortality rate will change dramatically once the hospitals fill up.

I don't think that's true. covid has stronger age dependence. Just look at the ratio of covid vs. influenza deaths on the CDC's website (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm). 3:1 covid:flu for over 85, but 1:1 for 25-35 and 1:10 for children. (relative ratios as we don't know total covid infections).

This is especially striking with children: if the US had the same number of covid infections as seasonal flu, you'd probably have lower pediatric deaths from covid than flu.

These statistics don’t support that conclusion, because these statistics are for total deaths. You can’t meaningfully compare the total deaths from a disease that’s done for the season (Flu) with one that’s still on going (COVID-19).

What you should be comparing is case fatality rates.

But can you not compare the ratios between age groups? That's all I'm doing here - showing deaths have a higher age correlation with covid than flu. - not making any statement about absolute CFR/IFR.

No, because you don’t know what the infection rate is by each demographic.

You have to compare just the case fatality rate. Comparing fatality ratios alone is too likely to measure unrelated factors.

Fair enough, but would there be a reason it would be different? And even if it were, is that actually relevant?

Anyway, here's some IFR estimations for covid by Imperial college: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

You see significantly higher multipliers by age group than for flu. As one example, they are guessing teenagers have 1/17th the mortality rate of say a 40 year old. For flu (going by deaths), it's about 1/5th.

There is absolutely plenty of reason for the infection rate to be different by demographic: we closed schools down. We don’t do that for the flu.

We also don't Shelter in place for flu. Bay Area school closure date is 1 day before SIP.

Sweden and Iceland never closed schools for young kids. Data doesn't look any different.

Sweden has a substantially higher case fatality rate for COVID-19 compared to other industrialized nations, so it's an interesting case.

That’s a good argument.

It's more likely that cases/infections is skewed by age, because we test severe cases more than mild cases, than infections as a whole is skewed by age. Assuming infections are uniformly distributed, or rather have a similar distribution to the flu, seems entirely reasonable until we have good data suggesting otherwise.

There is no reason to believe that infections aren’t skewed by age. We took a wide range of preventative measures that are completely unique within living memory, such as closing down most schools and colleges. Until we’ve actually done statistical analysis on who got sick, any predictions based on historical trends are largely invalid.

Sure, but there is also no reason to believe that they are. There is however very good reason to believe that testing is skewed by age.

Almost certainly. The US had 27k deaths in the past two weeks. That's more than some entire years of flu related deaths. Give it another few weeks and it will be more than any recent year.