Fact check: COVID-19, flu cases reported separately

Nate Trela, USA TODAY
·4 min read
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The claim: There were no flu cases last year because they were all reported as COVID-19

A theme in COVID-19 misinformation that has been debunked for years is an insistence that the virus is the same as the flu.

A video shared Dec. 6 on Instagram contends that all flu cases were reported by health officials as COVID-19 last year, possibly to drive up demand for vaccines.

“In the USA, already, there are record high cases of flu,” a woman walking through a wooded area says in the video. “That's right, flu. And last year there were none at all on the whole planet.”

She adds: “It's almost as if flu was counted as COVID last year and now suddenly it's back again. But obviously we'd never be lied to by our own governments so that they could profit from big pharma."

The video was liked more than 20,000 times in two weeks.

But the claim is wrong on multiple fronts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 9 million flu cases in the 2021-22 flu season. Data for both diseases has been reported separately. Experts say the flu and COVID-19 are different diseases that affect the body and spread in different ways.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who made the claim for comment.

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Different viruses, different data

While both are respiratory diseases with some overlapping symptoms, COVID-19 is caused by a coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, while the flu is caused by the influenza A and B viruses. The coronavirus is more contagious, more deadly and spreads more quickly than the flu. It also causes some different symptoms such as the loss of taste or smell and symptoms generally take longer to appear after exposure, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Since the CDC first announced a lab-confirmed case of COVID-19 on Jan. 20, 2020, it has reported data separately for COVID-19 and influenza.

The CDC reported an estimated 9 million flu illnesses, 4 million flu-related medical visits, 100,000 flu-related hospitalizations and 5,000 flu deaths in the 2021-2022 flu season. The flu season roughly spans September through May, with peak activity coming between December and February.

Those numbers are significantly lower than the 36 million cases, 390,000 hospitalizations and 25,000 deaths estimated in the 2019-20 flu season by the CDC.

It also is significantly more than the 2020-21 season, when the CDC said there were just 1,675 lab-confirmed cases in the U.S. The CDC attributed that season's low numbers to mask-wearing, social distancing, lockdowns and other preventative measures undertaken to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Such measures were particularly stressed in the 2020-21 season, when the seriousness of COVID-19 was recognized but vaccines were not readily available.

By comparison, the CDC reports there have been 99.7 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 1 million deaths from the disease since it was first detected in the U.S. in January 2020.

USA TODAY recently debunked a claim that a kit testing for COVID-19 and the flu proved both are caused by the same virus, noting that the kit tested separately for antigens for each underlying virus.

PolitiFact and the Associated Press also debunked the claim that there were no flu cases last year.

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that there were no cases of flu last year because they were reported as COVID-19. Millions of flu and COVID-19 cases were reported – separately – in publicly available data. The number of flu cases was likely lower in the past two flu seasons because of the safety measures being taken to reduce possible COVID-19 exposure, experts say. The diseases are caused by different viruses.

Our fact-check sources:

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Millions of flu cases last year in the U.S.