Unless you do something unusual, that's almost exactly what it means. (Almost exactly because new causes appear, and those chances won't stay constant during your life.)

No.

US population: 330M

Deaths per year (approx): 3.46M (call it 1% of the population)

2.5% of deaths: 86,500 people

Number of flu infections, per year: 9M .. 41M

2.5% chance of dying of flu: 225,000 .. 1,025,000 people

Number of deaths due to flu, per year: 4,900 .. 51,000

Actual chance of dying of flu (2010-2022): 0.01% - 0.5% [0]

[0] min ((4900/41000000), 4900/9000000)) .. max (51000/41000000, 51000/9000000)

The OP didn't say "per year". You added that one gratuitously.

It makes no difference at all. But whatever set of statistics you use has to represent the same period. We could use daily deaths from flu, or decadal deaths from flu, or forthnightly deaths from flu .. as long as the total deaths we're comparing with cover the same period.

Thanks for this breakdown, I was too tired to protest but I completely agree with your interdiction.

I mean, I began by saying:

> the IFR of the seasonal flu is around 0.1%

We're all going to die some day. Based on current causes of death, there's a 20% chance, give or take, that it will be heart disease. A 20% chance it will be cancer. A 2% chance one of us will die from kidney failure. And around a 1.5% chance it will be from the seasonal flu, which has an IFR of 0.1% or less.

Anyway, bringing this back around to the Spanish flu, it's fascinating, to me, that if you were alive in 1918, there was around a 1% chance you would die, that year, of the Spanish flu, and around a 2% chance you would die, years or decades later, of a seasonal flu. Pandemics get you upfront, all at once, epidemics get us eventually, over time.

"x% chance dying of the flu" has two vastly different meanings.

"If you die, then the cause of death is to 2.5% the flu" is one meaning. Likely close to correct.

"With 2.5% you will die this year a death caused by the flu" is another. Unlikely to be correct.