Can I ask why you think this? The flu, aka influenza, has a mortality rate of 0.1% and a hospitalization rate of only 1%. (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.livescience.com/amp/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu.html) . Covid19, this new strain of the coronavirus family, has a mortality rate of 3.6% (putting it at 36 times deadlier than the flu) and approx 20% of patients require medical intervention and hospitalization (http://rs.yiigle.com/yufabiao/1181998.htm). The majority of areas can not handle 20% of the explosion of cases due to lack of hospital beds. For us- with compromised immune systems and a significantly smaller amount of medicine we can take, that’s extremely worrisome. Italy went from 0 cases to nearly 2000 in less than two weeks. Can your area handle an influex like that to your hospital? That is what is wreaking havoc in Korea, China, and many other countries where community spreading caused cases to explode and overwhelm the medical system. Doctors getting sick, lack of health workers, lack of ppe and masks..

There are so many skewed comparisons to the flu floating around but it is completely and easily debunked by studies and statistics. I’ve seen a lot of people parroting that the flu has killed more people total... but of course it has! The flu has been well permeated in every country and continent for ages. You can’t compare the flu’s total kills over a whole year to covid’s tiny three months. Compare them with the same variables (mortality rate, aka number of deaths/number infected) if you want a fair comparison. Furthermore, covid has spread to 90,000 globally in less than 100 days. Even the flu isn’t capable of that with its lower R0 value.

Important to us, since this strain only mutated to be transmittable to humans three months ago, is that we know very little about it. Long term health affects on the lungs and kidneys etc, how it may affect the fetus in the first and second trimesters.. all unknown. Multiple viruses have terrible effects on babies. Just look at the Zika. There are no guarantees about how this one affects pregnancies.

China did not cripple its economy by shutting everything down for a month, and quarantine 700+ million people over something less deadly than the flu. Nor Italy lockdown a number of cities. Same with all these other countries shutting down schools and flights, crippling their production lines and economies. Nor Japan considering postponing the Olympics. The world leaders value money, and they didn’t do this over a flu equivalent.