“Is Omicron the same as flu? No. But the vaccines have made the risks to the individual very similar,” said Dr Raghib Ali, senior clinical research associate in epidemiology at Cambridge university, who added that this made a “large spike” in hospital admissions or deaths “unlikely” while Omicron remained the dominant strain.
The proportion of people infected with Covid-19 in England who go on to die has dipped below that of seasonal flu, which has an infection fatality rate of 0.04 per cent, for the first time during the pandemic, according to the FT calculations.
The infection fatality rate from Covid-19 fell more than 10-fold from a little more than 1 per cent in January 2021 to 0.1 per cent in July as the UK’s vaccination campaign was rolled out, and the emergence of Omicron brought about a further three-fold reduction.
For every 100,000 Omicron infections, 35 will result in death, while the equivalent number of flu infections will lead to 40 fatalities, the data showed. Even among the over-80s, where about one-in-200 Omicron infections still results in death, this figure is now lower than the equivalent for flu.
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