Fox personalities frequently argued that coronavirus would be no worse than the flu back in early March, when the network was minimizing the danger to defend Trump’s lax handling of the virus. These claims were foolish at the time -- evidence suggested coronavirus was both more deadly and more contagious than the flu, and there is no vaccine for the former as there is for the latter.

But anyone still pushing that comparison is either very stupid, very dishonest, or both.

The short explanation for why is that during a “really aggressive flu season,” you don’t see hospital intensive care units filled to bursting with flu patients, or refrigerated trucks employed to store the bodies of the deceased because morgues are overrun, as happened in New York City.

Here’s a longer one. The worst flu outbreak in recent history came in 2017-18. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 61,000 Americans died of flu over the course of that flu season. That estimate is an overcount -- it includes “influenza-associated deaths” in which the deceased did not receive a flu test but passed away from a condition often but not always caused by the flu, such as pneumonia.

By contrast, COVID-19 has been one of the leading causes of death in the United States for weeks. More than 50,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 over a much smaller period of time than a flu season. That figure is almost certainly an undercount, because unlike the CDC’s flu estimate, the COVID-19 data largely does not include people who died with symptoms of the virus but were never tested for it. And we have this death toll figure despite an unprecedented lockdown that suppressed the virus’ spread.

This graph from The New Atlantis shows just how bad the comparison between flu and the coronavirus is. The red line is reported new deaths every week from COVID-19. The yellow line shows reported weekly deaths attributed directly to flu during the 2017-18 flu season (an undercount), while the yellow line shows reported weekly deaths attributed to flu or pneumonia that season (an overcount). By week 8, COVID-19 weekly deaths had roughly doubled the peak of the flu overcount -- and was still increasing.