Also, these are the numbers for CV19 given unprecedented social distancing measures, entire hospitals dedicated to it, border closures and so on. If nothing had been done, it seems likely, given regional examples like Italy's Bergamo area, the death rate could easily be 10 times what is observed today, if not more.

Equally, with much stronger and more targeted measures, the death and infection rate can be brought to essentially 0 without impacting the whole population as much, as shown by Vietnam.

It is still absurd to call a disease that has already killed many more people than malaria this year 'similar to the flu'. Sure, the flu is bad, but in conservative estimates, Covid19 is 5 times worse (and in more equal comparisons, where we would take similar measures to what we do for flu, it is probably more than 100 times worse).

My understanding, however, is that the transmissibility of covid-19 is 3 to 10 times greater than the common flu. For instance, our local public transit agency doesn't have dozens of drivers testing positive for the flu and having symptoms each year. Coupled with the, something between 2 and 10 times greater death rate, the largest concern is overrunning hospitals if there is a bad wave in an area. As another example, because it's more transmissible, my community is also worried about getting infected because don't want to infect family if we get it, whereas I don't think we worry about the same with the flu.

My understanding of the current situation is that if everyone would wear a mask and social distance, there would be very little reason to continue with many of the other precautions that have been instituted. As you said, we live with the flu, so we don't need to make the transmissibility 0.

I'm going to be very interested to look back at this in a decade and see what we've learned and what could have been differently. How overblown, or conversely, how valid are our fears right now? The biggest problem is we just don't know, and won't for a while.