And if we don't take immediate action against the Coronavirus threat, it will kill more than the flu, given it is an order of magnitude more dangerous and just as infectious.

It’s helpful to see the age profile for mortality. If you are under 50 it’s not a big concern IMO, but older folk should definitively take serious precautions. Here is the profile for COVID-19:

https://www.statista.com/chart/20860/coronavirus-fatality-ra...

People seem to think they're really clever when they point this out for some reason. But it's really obvious that a endemic globally spread virus has killed more than a brand new that has barely spread at all yet.

This is not helpful these days.

The novel coronavirus, spreading uncontained is able to infect 40-60% of the worlds population according to some calculations, killing mostly the weak and the elderly at a rate 10x above the influencas rates.

Downvoting is also not helpful.

I have family members that work in a few different hospitals in the US. Co-workers in the hospitals are mostly all saying the same thing: Covid isn't so bad, look at how many people influenza kills every year.

This is the intellectual equivalent of: "I have nothing to hide," in the privacy debate. It's a form of bargaining, passive resignation, comforting one's self, hiding from reality, diverting mental attention. It's understandable of course.

The problem with the premise is obvious: if we get as many Covid cases as influenza cases, it's going to kill half a million grandparents in the US, at a minimum. I say grandparents, because it overwhelmingly hits people over 60 the hardest (so far) and because these people are important pillars of families and communities, and not just old people (often portrayed that way, played down in criticality, when discussing mortality rates; usually contrasted with: at least it's sparing the young). A half million dead grandparents, or more, in a single year will be extremely traumatizing to the nation. Drastically beyond the damage that influenza does annually.

Covid also appears to hammer weaker health systems (for all the various reasons that have been discussed on HN on numerous occasions), as we're seeing in Iran right now. So 3/4 of nations are very at risk. And that risk also poses a persistent reinfection scenario, where the virus doesn't get snuffed out and keeps going around and coming around (see: China's recent concerns about importing the virus by way of citizens returning home with it). To say nothing of mutation risk, where it hits even harder in a second wave.

I suspect this was submitted as a "whataboutism" comparing the COVID-19 response to seasonal flu response. I agree that it would be nice for people to care about seasonal flu more but the fear of the unknown is what drives COVID-19 response and it's not helpful to simply point out that other viruses kill more people.