How many people die from influenza per year in the world

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-18 00:05

To understand how threatening the situation has developed in the world due to the coronavirus, it is best to turn to statistics and compare the data with how many people die from the flu per year. And for a more complete picture, you can use the information about the sensational epidemics over the past half century.

Death statistics from pandemics

On January 30, 2020, Business Insider published a summary of statistics showing data on the most notorious diseases of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It contains data on such epidemics:

• the 1967 Ebola outbreak and its recurrence in 2014-2015;
• 1997 H5N1 avian influenza;
• SARS SARS in 2002;
• "Swine" flu or otherwise "Mexican" H1N1 2009-2010;
• Middle East Respiratory Syndrome MERS-CoV 2012;
• a new outbreak of 2013 H7N9 avian influenza.

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WHO statistics at the end of the outbreak were used, with the exception of swine flu. In 2002, countries barely tracked the spread of infection. Therefore, official information (414,000 infected and 5,000 deaths) is considered grossly underestimated.

The table below used data from a post-pandemic study by 60 scientists from 26 countries led by Lone Simonsen, professor of global health at George Washington University. However, they were also recognized by WHO as real in 2019. For comparison, the data on the COVID-19 pandemic from March 22, 2020 are given:

Name	Infection cases, people	Mortality, human	Ratio,%
Ebola 1976	33 577	13 562	40, 4
H5N1	861	455	52, 8
SARS	8096	774	9, 6
H1N1	762 630 000	284 500	0, 02
MERS-CoV	2 494	858	34, 4
H7N9	1 568	616	39, 3
Ebola 2014	28 640	11 315	31, 5
COVID-19	316 409	13 599	4, 3

It turns out that, according to WHO statistics, the current pandemic can already be called one of the most dangerous over the past half century. So far, her only rival is the "swine" flu A / H1N1. However, the mortality rate in 2009-2010 was 200 times lower, therefore, the consequences of the spread of the virus affected the world community much less.

Seasonal flu mortality statistics

Before calculating how many people die from influenza in the world per year, it must be borne in mind that only a small number of countries can provide such statistics to WHO. Therefore, in order to obtain accurate information, a full-scale study was carried out in 2017 under the leadership of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the director of the WHO emergency program, Peter Salama.

Information was collected from 33 countries, in which 57% of the world's population live, for the period from 1999 to 2015. According to the results of the calculations, it turned out that every year in the world, from seasonal flu, 291,000–646,000 people die.

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More precisely, it is impossible to say how many deaths occur annually, due to the fact that not all infected people go to clinics for treatment. Therefore, the real data can be several times higher.

At risk are children under 5 years old, as well as elderly people over 75 years old. At the same time, according to statistics from the US National Center for Biotechnology Information, the maximum mortality rate in the poorest countries in Africa and South America is about 85 people per 100,000 population.

For other states, according to various studies, this indicator is for every hundred thousand inhabitants:

• China - 1, 6-2, 6;
• USA - 0.05;
• European countries - 0, 07-0, 3;
• Russia - 0, 05-0, 43.

For coronavirus, when calculating the number of deaths per 100,000 population, an indicator of 0.2 is obtained for the world as a whole. If we use the WHO data on pneumonia for a more accurate comparison, then according to statistics of 2017, the number of deaths per 100,000 people in the world was:

• South Africa (maximum) - 159;
• China - 13;
• USA - 15, 9;
• European countries - from 5 to 24;
• Russia - 17, 7.

In many ways, the high mortality rate from COVID-19 is recorded due to a lack of adequate treatment and a shortage of medical personnel, ventilators and hospital beds in countries with particularly high levels of infection. But even under these conditions, it is not much higher than when infected with the flu or pneumonia.

Summarize

1. The coronavirus is more infectious than most viruses that have traveled the world over the past 50 years.
2. The mortality rate of COVID-19 is lower than that of seasonal flu or pneumonia.
3. The danger is the lack of a vaccine and the necessary conditions for the successful cure of a large number of patients in countries with a low level of medicine.