Gottlieb warns of comparisons between COVID-19 and flu after Kushner remarks | TheHill

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned against comparing the novel coronavirus to the flu Sunday, responding to remarks White House adviser Jared KushnerJared Corey KushnerSunday shows preview: Mail-in voting, USPS funding dominates political debate before conventions Newsweek apologizes for Kamala Harris op-ed Jared Kushner denies Trump ‘promoting’ questions about Kamala Harris MORE made earlier in the day.

CBS’ Margaret Brennan noted that in the earlier segment, Kushner had said he was comfortable sending his children back to school, arguing they were “six times as likely” to die from flu as from the virus.

@ScottGottliebMD says Americans need to be “careful” in making comparisons of #COVID19 to the flu when it comes to kids, noting flu prevalence is far greater among children:

Flu➡️upwards of 400 deaths a year
COVID-19 ➡️90 deaths so far pic.twitter.com/xi6McTsN4B

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) August 16, 2020

“Well, I don’t know where the six times comes from. We need to be careful, I think, about making comparisons to flu. This infection hasn’t been as prevalent in children as flu is each year, there’s been about 330,000 diagnosed infections,” Gottlieb said. “If you believe we’re diagnosing one in five to one in 10 infections in children, maybe there have been about three million kids who’ve been infected with this.”

Gottlieb conceded that coronavirus did not appear to be “as prevalent” in children compared to the flu. However, he noted that in addition to some 90 children’s deaths from the virus, there are indications that it may cause inflammatory post-viral syndromes in children in some case.

“So there’s a lot we don’t understand about COVID in kids. I think we need to be careful about making comparisons to flu and the death and disease we see in flu relative to COVID,” Gottlieb said.

The former FDA commissioner also acknowledged that while he had expected a peak and decline in deaths by this point, “there’s been a fairly persistent level of infection, hospitalizations and deaths over the last couple of weeks.”

“We’ve had over a thousand deaths a day for at least two weeks now, over 50,000 infections a day on average,” he said. “We hit 55,000 in the last day. Hospitalizations have come down a little bit, but they haven’t really started to decline very rapidly.”