What was claimed
The flu kills up to 650,000 people worldwide each year.
Our verdict
This is the WHO’s upper estimate of annual worldwide flu-related deaths, with a lower estimate of 290,000.
Estimates of 650,000 annual flu deaths can’t be compared to Covid-19 deaths
21 January 2022
A number of pictures on Facebook show a sticker stating that “the flu kills up to 650,000 people worldwide each year.”
The text on the sticker continues: “You weren’t scared of it, because the media didn’t tell you to be,” in an apparent reference to Covid-19. False and misleading comparisons between the flu and Covid-19 have persisted throughout the pandemic.
The assertion made on the sticker about flu deaths doesn’t tell the full story. In 2017 the World Health Organisation (WHO) said up to 650,000 deaths worldwide are associated with respiratory diseases linked to seasonal flu each year, but this was the upper limit of the estimate, which ranged from 290,000 to 650,000 deaths.
While this is a significant total, it is far lower than the number of recorded deaths from Covid-19—more than 5.5 million since the start of the pandemic according to the WHO. The organisation was first notified of a cluster of unexplained pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, on 31 December 2019.
Photo courtesy of Mika Baumeister, via Unsplash.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because the sticker pictured fails to explain that this is the top estimate for flu-related deaths.