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 conclusion of the pandemic. After all, both diseases are caused by a severe respiratory virus that ebbs and flows with the seasons. However, I'd like to present a different metaphor to assist us think about our precarious situation: The "new normal" will occur when we recognize that the risks of COVID have converged with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID fatalities, like many smoking-related deaths, might be avoided with a simple action.

The pandemic's most dangerous threat has evolved from an infection to a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is currently a modifiable health risk comparable to smoking, which kills over 400,000 individuals in the United States each year. According to Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, if COVID continues to kill a few hundred thousand Americans each year—"a reasonable worst-case scenario," he puts it—it will wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains made during the past two decades of smoking-prevention efforts.