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The COVID-19 pandemic is the most challenging health crisis since the 1918 influenza pandemic, yet some comparisons have played down COVID-19 as “not more severe than the flu.” To address this knowledge gap, researchers evaluated morbidity, mortality, and healthcare resource use associated with COVID-19 versus seasonal influenza in an analysis of Veterans Affairs healthcare data from 3641 hospitalized patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 (admitted between February and June 2020) and 12,676 patients with seasonal influenza (admitted between January 2017 and December 2019).
Compared with seasonal influenza, COVID-19 conferred significantly higher risk for acute renal failure, need for dialysis, septic shock, need for vasopressors, deep …