Are coronavirus precautions lowering flu infection rates?

“Logically, they will. But we will only know this when the season is over,” former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official Dr. Robert Amler said during a Fox News liveblog.

ILLNESS

Now when Americans are getting sick, the current question is: with what?

Is it the flu, a cold or the new coronavirus? Patients and doctors alike are parsing signs of illness to figure out who needs what tests or care and how worried they should be.

Amler noted there is overlap between coronavirus and the flu because “they look very similar.”

The efforts to tame the new virus will also control the flu in the process.

He said: “The full spectrum will only be known as we get through a season or two of this virus. This is all the more reason for people to get flu shots so their symptoms don't get confused with the flu.”

So what’s the biggest danger? And why are we responding to them so differently?

The medical impact of the new coronavirus is coming into sharper focus as it continues its spread in what is now officially recognized as a pandemic.

Globally, drugs like Kaletra, Remdesivir, and Chloroquine are being used to combat the new virus.

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DEATH

The true fatality rate of the coronavirus isn’t yet known, but it seems 10 times higher than the flu, which kills hundreds of thousands around the world each year.

Most people have had mild to moderate illness and recovered, but coronavirus is more serious for those who are older or have other health problems.

In the U.S., 60 percent of adults have at least one underlying health condition and 42 percent have two or more.

The death rate for coronavirus has been higher among people with other health problems -- more than 10 percent for those with heart disease, for example. In the U.S., 30 million have diabetes, more than 70 million are obese and nearly 80 million have high blood pressure.

Researchers are still trying to understand just how deadly the new coronavirus is. The mortality rate from infection with the virus isn’t known yet because the cases caught in an early part of an outbreak are often the most severe, people with mild or no symptoms aren’t being tested, and sometimes overwhelmed hospitals struggle to care for the sickest patients. Various reports have estimated the fatality rate from less than 1 percent to as high as 4 percent among cases diagnosed so far, depending on location.

COVID-19 is a flu-like illness that has killed a small fraction of the number of people that the flu kills every year.

The number of infections in the U.S. climbed to about 4,300, with at least 78 deaths, two-thirds of them in hard-hit Washington state, where many residents of a suburban Seattle nursing home have been cut down by the virus.

Worldwide, the outbreak has sickened more than 180,000 people and left more than 7,100 dead.

Flu kills 290,000 to 650,000 every year around the world, according to the World Health Organization.

Flu kills about 0.1 percent of those it infects, but that’s still hundreds of thousands of people each year because it infects millions.

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CURE

Flu symptoms are more intense and usually come on suddenly, the Yale New Haven Health System advises. They can include a high fever (more than 100.5 degrees), extreme exhaustion, muscle or body aches, a dry cough and chills.

Symptoms of COVID-19 may appear more slowly. They usually include fever, a dry cough and noticeable shortness of breath, according to the World Health Organization. A minority of cases develop pneumonia, and the disease is especially worrisome for the elderly and those with other medical problems such as high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes or heart conditions.

There’s one big difference between flu and coronavirus: A vaccine exists to help prevent the flu and it’s not too late to get it. It won’t protect you from catching the coronavirus, but may put you in a better position to fight it.

“You don’t want to have a compromised immune system if you were to encounter coronavirus,” said Dr. Gary LeRoy, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

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To public health experts, the huge number of flu deaths is exactly why extraordinary steps should be taken to try to prevent the new coronavirus from spreading widely.

The flu’s annual return can’t be stopped because it’s already so embedded in the population. There is still a chance COVID-19 cases can be limited or spread slowed while treatments are developed.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.