According to the research, people hospitalized with Omicron variant infections were 54 percent more likely to die, compared to those admitted with the flu.

The results of the study, published in JAMA Network Open and cited this Thursday by Infomed, Cuba’s Health Network, continues to discredit a previous belief since the beginning of the pandemic that the flu was the more dangerous of the two respiratory viruses.

The experts noted that the lethality of the disease-causing SARS-CoV-2 compared to influenza persisted “despite evolution of the virus and improved management strategies.”

The investigation included 5,212 patients in Switzerland hospitalized with one of the two conditions, between January 15, 2022 and March 15, 2022 (for Covid-19), while the influenza data covered cases since January 2018 until March 15, 2022. It showed that seven percent of Covid-19 patients died, compared to 4.4 percent of those diagnosed with the flu.

The scientists highlighted that the mortality rate of patients hospitalized with the pandemic decreased from their previous study, carried out during the first wave that occurred in the first half of 2020, when the figure reached 12.8 percentage points.

Since then, 98 percent of the Swiss population has been vaccinated.

“Vaccination continues to play an important role with respect to the primary outcome,” the authors stated, as a more recent analysis, secondary to this study, showed that unvaccinated coronavirus patients were twice as likely to die compared with unvaccinated patients. people with flu.

“Our results demonstrate that Covid-19 cannot yet be simply compared to influenza,” they concluded.

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