Is COVID losing its fangs and becoming more like the flu? - The Mercury News

George Lemp, an infectious disease epidemiologist who has analyzed California public health data through the pandemic, thinks so.

He said death rates have fallen consistently over the last two and a half years.

“COVID-19 case fatality rates are substantially lower and are rapidly approaching that of the annual flu,” said Lemp, former Director of the California HIV/AIDS Research Program at the University of California, Office of the President.

Lemp said California Department of Public Health data show that California’s COVID-19 death rate early in the pandemic, from February 2020 to May 2021, was 1.7% overall and dropped to 1.11% when the delta variant hit from July to December 2021.

When the even more transmissible omicron variant BA.1 hit from December through February, the rate fell to 0.34%.

The most recent data with the omicron sub-variants BA.4 and BA.5 from June and July show a rate of 0.38%.

That would conservatively put the death rates from the current omicron BA.5 variant around 0.19%, a more flu-like level, he said.

COVID-19 death rate at 0.36%, down from a high of 2.88% in March 2021, using Johns Hopkins University case and death data.

The CDC and state public health officials had no comment on the COVID-19 death rates.

While epidemiologists agree the current virus is proving less lethal than earlier variants, it is still a killer and has made the many people who were infected recently and recovered absolutely miserable.