> Up to 3,000 have died from COVID so far, mostly in Hubei. Hubei has a population of ~60 million, which is ~18% of the US population. About 60,000 people died

> Up to 3,000 have died from COVID so far, mostly in Hubei. Hubei has a population of ~60 million, which is ~18% of the US population. About 60,000 people died from flu-related illness last year in the US. The same proportion in Hubei would be 10,800. So it seems it is demonstrably less harmful than flu. How do you come to that conclusion? This is not an apples to apples comparison. You’re looking at the annual deaths in the US and comparing them to 2 months of deaths mostly in Wuhan, and those Wuhan deaths were largely curbed due to extremely draconian policies enacted to slow the spread. If you want to begin to try to compare annual deaths to Wuhan deaths so far, then if ~3,000 people died in 2 months in Wuhan, then you’d have 18,000 deaths in Wuhan in a year assuming a linear distribution (which has its flaws). But that’s still not apples to apples, since that’s with the extreme mitigation policies that are in effect in Wuhan, and seasonality comes into play for the flu over the span of a year (more deaths in the colder months) but we don’t know how seasonality will impact coronavirus yet. If Coronavirus is to become widespread and uncontainable, then it is still ramping up to whatever “normal” levels you’d expect to see (if it becomes a recurring seasonal bug like the flu), and that’s also assuming that Wuhan’s absolute death count isn’t impacted by its total population size —- there’s a larger population in the US, and different healthcare practices, population density, travel patterns, authoritarian-draconian policies, all with positive and negative effects onto the R0. I don’t see how you can definitively say that the flu is demonstrably more harmful. But it may be helpful to say that the flu makes things worse, since they have similar symptoms and not everybody has their flu shots. A big threat to mitigation would be maxing out the healthcare infrastructure. If more people got their flu shots then less people would be showing up to the hospital with flu-like symptoms that aren’t covid-19.