Do you still think coronavirus is just like the flu? Here’s why COVID-19 is more dangerous.

First, some good news.

Flu season is effectively over, according to Nate Wardle, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Cases had dropped enough that the department stopped producing its weekly flu reports at the end of March.

That doesn’t mean the flu is gone. But it does mean that doctors can focus more resources on that other threat, the coronavirus.

The coronavirus has already outstripped flu as a killer in Pennsylvania, leading to 309 deaths compared with 102 deaths in laboratory-confirmed flu cases this year. During the 2017-18 flu season, the worst in the last five years, there were 258 flu deaths.

Some models predict that fatalities in this first wave of coronavirus will peak locally in mid-April, but there will be weeks of illness and death after that.

Thirteen weeks into the coronavirus era, some still question whether the new disease is bad enough to warrant an economic shutdown when influenza, a disease that kills thousands every year, is treated as an annual inconvenience. Some Twitter users, including the conservative radio host Bill Mitchell, call the coronavirus “flu lite.” A Pew Research Survey released April 1 and conducted from March 10 to 16 found that 79% of regular Fox News viewers believed the news media had exaggerated the risks of the new virus.

Gregory A. Poland, a Mayo Clinic infectious diseases specialist who acts as a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said the question always comes up when he does radio talk shows: “Isn’t this just the flu or a ‘bad flu’?”

John J. Zurlo, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Jefferson Health, thinks the answer is clear. Both diseases can kill, but the scale of the coronavirus problem, he said, is “much, much larger.”

There are some obvious reasons to compare flu and coronavirus. The viruses can cause similar symptoms, including fever and body aches. Both are more likely to cause serious illness and death in people over age 65. This year’s flu virus has been unusually tough on children, while the coronavirus seems to largely spare them. Like all illnesses, Poland said, both cause a wide range of symptoms, with some people unaware they’ve been infected and others made deathly sick.

» READ MORE: What are the first symptoms of coronavirus?

A huge difference is that there are vaccines for flu each fall. They’re not perfect, but when well-matched to the circulating strains of flu, which change every year, they reduce the number of cases and the amount of serious disease. There is no vaccine for the coronavirus, which can cause a disease that no one in the world had before it emerged in China in December. Unlike the flu, there are no proven antiviral treatments for coronavirus.

“I hate to think of what flu seasons would be like if we had no vaccinations,” Zurlo said.

Lisa McHugh, an epidemiologist with the New Jersey Department of Health, said it’s too early to say whether flu is done with her state for the season. Tests are way down, but New Jersey has been grappling with a high coronavirus caseload. So far, the state has had 47,437 coronavirus cases and 1,504 deaths. It does not report flu deaths.

The National Center for Health Statistics, which uses death certificate data, says there have been 1,346 deaths caused by flu and pneumonia in New Jersey and 2,019 in Pennsylvania this season. Pneumonia is a major complication of flu and is the primary reason that people who have had the disease die, but it can also be caused by other things. It is also a major cause of death in coronavirus patients.

McHugh, who declined to say whether the coronavirus is worse than flu, said many do not take flu seriously enough. “I do know how dangerous influenza is,” she said, “and I do know a lot of people brush off influenza.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated at the end of March that 39 million Americans had gotten the flu, and that 400,000 had been hospitalized and 24,000 had died. The death toll for coronavirus is 12,912 after more than 401,000 identified cases, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Experts said both flu and COVID-19 are under-reported. Many people who have flu are never tested for it, and there have not been enough coronavirus kits to test everyone with symptoms.

If you look at the numbers, coronavirus is clearly the more dangerous adversary — keeping in mind, as Poland pointed out, that doctors only have about three months of data. They are “literally building the airplane while they fly it.” A crucial number that is among the hardest to get is how many people infected with the coronavirus have no symptoms or very minor ones. It is important for determining any rates involving the new disease and for now must be estimated.

The death rate for flu — usually about 0.1% — is thought to be many times lower than for the coronavirus. The current best estimate for the coronavirus is 1%. That seems pretty low until you realize that the world has nearly eight billion people.

It also matters how easily a virus spreads. Each person with flu tends to infect one other person. The estimate is that one person with the coronavirus infects 2.5 others, a difference that quickly leads to much higher numbers.

Then there’s the hospitalization rate, which is why health systems are anticipating or experiencing such a crunch. Based on the CDC’s numbers, this year’s hospitalization rate for flu has been 1.3%. Studies put this rate for the coronavirus as high as 20%, with about a quarter of that group needing intensive care. “That’s a very high number,” Zurlo said.

» READ MORE: With viruses like flu and coronavirus, pneumonia often delivers the fatal blow

McHugh said New Jersey is seeing higher emergency department use for coronavirus than it usually does for flu.

Patrick Gavigan, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Penn State Children’s Hospital in Hershey, said flu patients who need to go to the hospital typically stay five to six days. Coronavirus patients average 10- to 14-day stays.

Flu tends to be most deadly for the very young and the very old. It can also kill adults in low-risk groups. “We see healthy people who get flu and die every year, and the overwhelming majority of them are unvaccinated against influenza,” Gavigan said.

At best, Poland said, 60% to 70% of seniors, less than 50% of pregnant women, and less than 30% of young adults get flu shots in a given year.

While most of the people who die of the coronavirus have pre-existing health problems like heart and lung disease or diabetes, the disease also seems to be causing very serious illness in more younger, healthy people than flu does.

Zurlo wonders how the nation would react if an especially deadly strain of flu emerged. The big advantage we’d have, he said, is that the medical world is much better acquainted with flu. There are anti-viral drugs that can slow it, and drug companies know how to make vaccines.

“At least we have a model for that,” he said. “At least we have a fighting chance.”

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