I don't know for sure, but I'd say that death tolls every year from the flu are higher in certain areas for various reasons. The overall numbers of deaths from covid this year are about 25% of estimated yearly flu deaths, but of course we haven't finished this year yet.
Plus, that's comparing the total number of all deaths everywhere, whereas so far, only certain select cities and regions are particularly affected. It makes more sense to compare a single region to itself. Hypothetically, if a virus only strikes a single city, it doesn't make sense to compare those numbers to a virus that pops up in all cities. In the U.S., for example, rural areas have very few Covid-19 cases, but some big cities have a lot. So the best source of comparative data would be those very cities and/or regions. That's what I've tried to do so far in my posts on the numbers. It seems that in big cities/regions that are hard hit (e.g., Bergamo, London, NYC), whatever is going on is at least 2x, and up to 8x worse than any flu season in recent memory. For small towns and rural areas, it is much
less than an average flu season.
For example, as I showed in a recent post, in the past 25 years, the worst month of mortality in NYC was in January 1999, which was the peak of the flu season for that year. An average of 218 people died in the city daily of all causes. Over the past three weeks in New York, at least 367 people have died every day, and that's just those attributed to Covid-19, so total mortality is probably something higher than that. (That's assuming that they haven't been ascribing EVERY death to Covid-19, which is unlikely. But even if they have, the current overall mortality rate is about twice what NYC experiences at the peak of an average flu season.)
Here's a graph from the
NYT that shows total mortality for NYC over the past 20 years. I can't verify the 9780 figure, because I can't find current total mortality figures for the past month - just mortality allegedly related to Covid-19. But it's similar to the graphs posted earlier in this thread for Bergamo:
Since symptoms of covid-19 are similar to those of other 'seasonal viruses', It will be interesting to see if the number of flu deaths this year is down significantly. Then again, that is problematic in that flu deaths every year are "estimated", because almost no one who dies from "complications from the flu" is tested for a virus, mainly because the vast majority that die have one or more pre-existing chronic illnesses that are used as the cause of death.
For Italy, this last flu season, which usually peaks in February, was relatively mild - below average, which was reflected in overall mortality. Overall mortality seems to be a good indicator of how bad any given flu season is, as far as I can tell. In NYC, this last flu season was on par with the one a couple years ago. Flu season usually peaks in January in NYC. For example, here's the ILI tracker for NYC, showing the peaks of past flu seasons, with the Covid spike directly after the January peak:
Here's respiratory illness:
If you go to the
link you can change the metric to 'average ratio' which shows the ratio of the above cases that required emergency room services. Here are the graphs for ILI followed by respiratory: