Worse than 1918?

Continuing their agenda of alarming the public, the New York Times has published a new article suggesting this pandemic is worse than the Flu pandemic of 1918. Specifically, they report the excess death rate for Covid in 2020 at 16% while the same figure for 1918 is reported as 11%. How is this possible when the earlier flu killed more Americans (675,000), and the current US population is 3 times what it was then? Short answer: it's not.

The excess is easy to calculate for 2020 from CDC data. US Covid deaths 2020: 350,616. Normal US mortality 2019: 2,800,000. Excess mortality 2020: 12.5%

For 2018, we can use data from the census bureau. There are some caveats. 

1. The data only covers the "registration area" meaning states that are reporting their data. This shouldn't be too bad because we are only calculating percentages.
2. Influenza and Pneumonia are reported separately to allow comparison with international data. The documents instructs that the categories should be lumped together.
3. The data does not distinguish 'Spanish' influenza/pneumonia (IP) from other influenza/pneumonia.

The most straightforward approach simply compares total mortality for 1918 to previous years. Normal mortality had been decreasing since 1880 and was hovering around 1.41% by 1917. Total mortality in 1918 was 1.80%, so excess mortality was 30.0%

An alternative is to tease out the 'Spanish' influenza/pneumonia from the previous year's influenza/pneumonia. The total IP mortality rate for 1918 was 0.583% and the total IP mortality rate for 2017 was 0.167%. The difference is 0.416%. This is 29.5% excess mortality.

Final score: Covid 12%, Spanish Flu 30%