Five people in the US have been diagnosed with the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China.
The latest confirmed case, announced Sunday, is a resident of Maricopa County, Arizona, who recently returned from Wuhan. Two other cases were confirmed in California on Sunday, and the Chicago and Seattle areas each have one case.
Although the CDC considers this coronavirus (whose scientific name is 2019-nCoV) to be a serious public-health concern, the agency said in a statement Friday that “the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is considered low at this time.”
A graver health risk for Americans — not just right now, but every year — is the flu.
Since October, up to 20,000 people in the US have died of influenza. The coronavirus, meanwhile, has infected more than 2,800 people worldwide and killed 81.
“When we think about the relative danger of this new coronavirus and influenza, there’s just no comparison,” William Schaffner, a vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Kaiser Health News (KHN). “Coronavirus will be a blip on the horizon in comparison. The risk is trivial.”
Tens of thousands of Americans die of flu every year
At least 15 million Americans have caught the flu in the last four months; nearly a quarter million of them went to the hospital. Since flu season peaks between December and February, the worst could be still to come.
“Influenza rarely gets this sort of attention, even though it kills more Americans each year than any other virus,” Peter Hotez, a virologist at Baylor College of Medicine, told KHN.
The flu is not just a US problem, of course. According to the World Health Organization, seasonal influenza epidemics cause between 3 million and 5 million severe cases worldwide every year and kill up to 650,000 people per year.
In 2018, which brought the worst flu season in about 40 years, 80,000 people in the US died of the illness.