[koheripbal]

Influenza deaths are 2 per 100,000.

source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/flu.htm

SARS death rate is around 10%

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

[cjhopman]

You are comparing apples to oranges.

Here's a better set of comparisons:

Deaths per 100,000:

Influenza: 2

SARS: 0.22

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/flu.htm, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China

% of deaths of hospitalized people:

Influenza: ~10%

SARS: ???

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

% of deaths of diagnosed people (~CFR):

SARS: ~10%

Influenza: 0.1%-10% per strain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr..., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/

[koheripbal]

Your 0.22 number is nowhere in your sources, and is obviously off by several orders of magnitude based off of my original sources above.

[cjhopman]

I think you don't understand how mortality rates are calculated. This also explains why you took two completely unrelated measure and compared them to each other in your original post. Deaths per 100,000 is based on total population.

The SARS mortality rate for China in 2003 was ~0.02 (349 deaths, 1.3billion population). I was being nice to you and using just the population of southern china where the sars outbreak primarily occurred.

Whether that's the most appropriate measure for this comparison isn't clear, which is why included the other measures.

[cjhopman]

If you limit to just Taiwan or Hong Kong where SARS was pretty bad, you get 0.6 and 4.4 respectively. At that point, it's less of a good comparison as you should apply the same focusing in for influenza.

Also, that's looking at the US mortality rate for influenza which is particularly low. The worldwide average is 5.9, with regions ranging from 4.5-6.2 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6815659/).