March 10: "Just like the flu"?

CDC estimates that so far this season (in the US) there have been at least 34 million flu illnesses, 350,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 deaths from flu. So why are we freaking out about 29 deaths from the corona virus? Here are the reasons:
First of all the flu is a killer as well and measures such washing our hands will work for that too, and we do have a vaccine that increases our safety. However, it is a "known quantity", we know roughly how many people will be affected, and what the death rate is (around 0.1% and 0.05% this year -- certainly not a joke). Also, the health system has "adapted" to it. We have an adequate number of hospital beds and ICUs to take care of the worst cases. So, what's the difference with COVID-19?
The difference is that with COVID-19 we are only at the beginning of the exponential curve (in my previous chess-board example we'd be on the 4th or 5th square) and the numbers (if left unchecked) can easily get larger than those of the flu. It also appears that the death rate is higher and quite a bit so, about 3% so far (that's 30 times higher). But even if we assume that the numbers will be similar to those of the flu, the flu did not go away... do we have the extra beds and ICU's to take care of a second type of an even more deadly flu? From the example of what is already happening in other countries, and from what I've been reading, our system would be completely overwhelmed.
The time to stop COVID-19 is NOW, and we need to take measures that will appear to be unreasonable and "overkill" (as I explained in my previous post). We will "survive" no matter what... the question is how and and at what cost. Simply staying home, if you can, is an excellent idea.

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