In an average year flu kills about 500k people, in the same sense of how we say those die from Covid. And infects about 1B, will a reasonable percentage of those resulting in serious disease.
So you're experience isn't typical; the average person knows more people who suffered of flu.
You can't compare absolute fatality numbers (yet). The flu infects tens of millions of people each year and kills less about 0.2%. (Estimates are between 5%-20% of the US population get the flu each year.)
This coronavirus has only infected a few ten thousand people and has killed between 2% and 20% of the infected population (with the larger %s comprising weakened patients, like the elderly with preexisting conditions or people living in a country without a functional healthcare system, like Iran.
If the coronavirus scaled up to the number of infections as the flu, millions would die.
Average life expectancy based on age and comorbidities of the people who die is around 10-13 years. That is not an insignificant lifetime reduction.
0.5%-2% of the people who get it, die. That is much worse than the flu that kills 0.04-0.1% of the infected. The flu itself is already pretty deadly and this is much deadlier.
I'm not saying flu == covid, but since we're all talking about anecdotes, my grandmother technically died of the flu.
12-60k Americans die of the flu every year. So far 160k Americans have died of covid. Unless you've only been alive for a few years it's extremely unlikely you know 4 people that have died from covid and none from the flu...
Wow. Regular flu kills around 300-650k people per year worldwide, but in general it only has a 0.1% mortality rate; and guess what, it also only basically kills the elderly.
Now you have a virus with a mortality rate of 2-3%, so it'll kill a lot more people once it begins to spread. The sick people from the coronavirus also needs a lot more medical work and efforts to separate them from the rest of the populace.
The flu has a mortality rate of something like 0.1%, 200 our of 7000 is already 3%, 30x as deadly. Of course these aren't final numbers but the flu infects and afflicts vastly many more people than it kills.
The flu killed an estimated 50 million people in 1918, which if it was in current times would be about 250 million. People always get mad when others say it is just like the flu, but actually the flu has had way worse outbreaks than covid.
Wikipedia says about a few hundred thousand people globally die in a typical flu season that barely gets a mention in the news. That's perhaps the more topical comparison?
Significantly more people catch a flu virus than this coronavirus. So far this flu season the CDC is reporting a CFR of about 0.5% in the US (19 million cases, 10,000 deaths). If the Wuhan coronavirus were equally fatal that would equate to roughly 190 deaths worldwide so far. If the flu were as lethal as the conservative estimates for the Wuhan coronavirus we'd have on the order of 400,000 deaths in the United States alone. That's why people are talking about this coronavirus and largely blasé about the flu.
Additionally the flu typically only kills older or immunocompromised folks. When the flu starts killing healthy adults like H1N1 did in 2009 that tends to get a lot more attention.
So you're experience isn't typical; the average person knows more people who suffered of flu.
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