The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides annual mortality rate data for influenza/pneumonia - so combined, because most fatal cases of the flu involve pneumonia. In these cases, doctors often put “pneumonia” rather than “influenza” as the cause of death on death certificates. Per the CDC, this practice leads “to a gross underestimation of influenza’s true impact.” That impact is actually greater than the combined death rate of influenza/pneumonia, because the seasonal flu may lead to other fatal conditions besides pneumonia, such as congestive heart failure or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which are then listed as cause of death, compounding the underestimation. So when you read that Covid-19 is much more lethal than the flu, don’t accept it as the final word on the matter. If we don’t know how lethal the flu is, we can’t say for sure how much more lethal Covid-19 is.
One way to evaluate the relative impact of influenza/pneumonia and Covid-19 is to compare their population-level mortality rates - that is, how many deaths per unit of population, typically 100,000. Such information is available for each state, which I summarized in two charts. First, states in which the Covid-19 death rate is considerably lower than that state’s influenza/pneumonia mortality in 2018 (the most recent year data is available):
While the Covid-19 rates in the above 32 states are based on only a few months of data, most of these states appear to be on-track to a 2020 mortality rate that is lower than or comparable to the influenza-pneumonia mortality rate in 2018. The following states are another story:
Per the above chart, the Covid-19 death rates in six states are already well-above 2018 levels for influenza-pneumonia and the rest (10 states) are on-track to exceed those levels by the end of 2020.
This is why there can be no one-size-fits-all approach to easing the Covid-19 lockdown.