Question: Another follow-up: Has anyone compared the death or incidence rates for COVID and the flu in the under-60 population? I presume flu is more deadly for children.

Answer: You are right. And thank you for the follow-up question. Flu is more deadly in children than COVID-19. I pulled some data from CDC’s provisional death counts between Feb. 1 and May 16, 2020 to highlight these differences (Figure 1). Among those <15 years of age, flu has indeed caused more deaths. Meanwhile, for those ages 15+, COVID-19 has caused more death. This article published in Bloomberg earlier this month does a nice job simply estimating and describing differences in age-specific mortality between COVID-19 and influenza. And Our World in Data nicely summarizes what we know about risk of death from COVID.

Figure 1. COVID-19 Deaths and Influenza Deaths by Age