These are uncharted waters, and that breeds early speculation and overreaction; it’s natural and expected. Sure, influenza spreads broadly and does kill many people worldwide. But keep in mind there are 8 variants of the flu in constant circulation, and the statistics you see are the combination of these 8 variants. It is (mostly) seasonal to us, but along the equatorial tropic the flu is a year round struggle, and human immune systems have dealt with it, so even with a new strain we still have some immunity to blunt its severity. Our immune systems are naive to COVID-19. COVID is (so far) largely a single variant and when it arose, flu did not magically go away. Many healthcare facilitates will be treating both patients with flu and COVID, not to mention everyone else with heart disease, renal failure, obesity, and cancer etc. This the biggest worry.
The rate of spread in WESTERN countries will and so far has been much different than China and even South Korea simply because those countries are able to enact insanely restrictive measures with the stroke of a pen. China literally put >1 billion people on ice in a matter of days and it worked (for now, eventually those people need to go back to work). We are a Western country that is trying to replicate this strategy the best we can. Europe (specifically Italy and Spain) did not close things down soon and they are in big trouble. Their healthcare systems are teetering on collapse
Right now Covid-19 (CV) transmission is R2.2 versus R1.3 for flu (all the flus combined remember), which means data says CV is more infectious than flu. The hospitalization rate is also much higher (~10-20%), and we don’t have the infrastructure in our health system to deal with that. Also, for what it’s worth, the case fatality rate for CV is much higher than that of flu (0.1%). Based on available data for CV (182,406 infected and 7150 dead worldwide; https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html) CV is running a 3.92% case fatality rate, and as mentioned previously puts a much higher % of people in the hospital.
The precautions and restrictions in place certainly seem draconian, but if we don’t do anything and end up like Italy we are going to be in bad shape. None of this is ideal but it’s our best shot all things considered.