Not trying to sway anyone's opinion just providing food for thought
Well its kind of a big deal if you break down a couple of data points. People will latch onto the idea that the flu kills more people in a year than the COVID-19 virus does. Well statistically since we don't have years of data to project COVID-19 numbers lets project on what we do know. Seasonal flu kills 1 in 1,000 people where as current data on COVID-19 is estimated to kill 10 in 1,000. So COVID-19 is deadlier than the Flu as of right now. The Flu death rate is 0.01% but COVID-19 death rate in the US is about 1.5% (8.4% in Italy but they play that brand of football where they frown on using your hands on the ball so lets stick to the US numbers) According to the CDC numbers reported from 2/1/2020 to 4/11/2020 there have been 5,228 Flu deaths and 13,130 COVID-19 deaths.
COVID-19 is also more infectious than the flu. With the flu the average person will infect about 1.3 persons whereas with COVID-19 that number is around 2.25 people. As an individual it doesn't seem like a big difference but over a 90 day period that one person by spreading the infection ends up infecting 2,184,164 people. That same scenario with COVID-19 infects just short of 4,000,000 people. On 22/01/2020 the CDC reported 1 COVID-19 case in the US, and as of 18/04/2020 there were 720,630 cases and every day is more than the day reported before.
The most alarming part to me about the COVID-19 virus is that it is reported to initially be an animal virus and at some point last year mutated and was passed by animal to a human where it mutated again and is now passed person to person. This evolution through natural selection could prove to be difficult to get ahead of initially but like so many other virus outbreaks only time will prove if we acted appropriately.
Just for Context here are some US Virus events for comparison. Remember 1 reported case in January this year and we have 13,130 in about 3 months
1793 Yellow Fever between August 1 and November 9.approximatley 5,000 deaths
1906-1907 Typhoid fever approximately 10,771 deaths
1918-1920 Spanish Flu approximately 675,000 deaths (BTW it wasn't until 1942 that we developed a vaccine) “mother of all pandemics” "Life in much of America came to a standstill in October 1918 as municipalities shuttered public gathering places such as schools, churches, theaters and saloons"
1921-1925 Diphtheria approximately 15,520 deaths
1916-1955 Polio approximately 3,145 deaths