SEATTLE — Every day, researchers learn more about coronavirus but there's still a lot of data needed to understand what we are up against.
For weeks, a common argument compared the coronavirus to the flu.
Even the President compared the flu to the coronavirus, Tweeting earlier this month “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”
However, new numbers from the Washington Department of Health reveal a sobering reality.
Over the weekend, the state reported a total of 96 deaths related to the coronavirus.
Flu deaths are reported weekly and the latest count through March 14 totaled 86 deaths in Washington state. Those are lab-confirmed deaths and it's important to note the number is probably higher because of people not being tested.
Keep in mind, the flu season is trending down.
Health officials started tracking flu activity on Sept. 30, so the activity has been tracked for months.
We don't know when exactly coronavirus started spreading, but the first case wasn't identified until late January in the United States. The first death was reported less than a month ago.
That’s not to say the flu isn’t a big deal. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates the flu kills between 12,000 and 61,000 people annually.
But coronavirus is something new-- there's no vaccine like there is with the flu and no current treatment that has been proven to work.
With coronavirus, it could take longer for you to show symptoms, which could mean you spread it to more people.
Doctors, nurses and health care workers are ready for the flu, even on a bad year.
But throw a new deadly virus on top of that and it doesn't take much to overload the system.
Initial data from the CDC suggests coronavirus could hospitalize more people than the flu, but it's impossible to know for certain at this point because it's still not clear how many cases of coronavirus go unreported.
“Our hospitals, the threat here is we're going to break them. We don't have a thousand extra beds with a thousand extra nurses who can take care of all the stuff we normally do and throw on an epidemic on top of it,” said infection disease expert Dr. John Lynch during a KING 5 coronavirus special.
That's why social distancing is so important. If you stay at home, fewer people get sick.