COVID Isn't Going to Make You Sick Like the Flu. It'll be as though you're smoking
With a simple behavioral shift, hundreds of thousands of fatalities from tobacco or the pandemic may be avoided. It's now permissible to say that COVID is — or soon will be — similar to the flu. Pandemic minimizers have long used analogies like these, but they've recently made their way into more enlightened circles. Last month, the dean of a medical school wrote an open letter to his students, claiming that the risk of death from COVID-19 is "in the same realm, or even lower, than the typical American's risk from flu" for those who have been vaccinated. David Leonhardt, in his morning newsletter for The New York Times' millions of subscribers, said as much a few days later. Furthermore, three major public-health experts have urged the government to accept a "new normal" in which the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is "only one among several circulating respiratory viruses." COVID could end up looking like the flu by the time it reaches the conclusi
