While I don't expect the power to shut off from this, I want to point out that the flu virus doesn't directly destroy heart and kidney cells as COVID-19 does in some of the patients.

I cannot believe people are still saying this. It's literally 1-2 orders of magnitude more deadly than the flu, and 5% of the survivors walk away with permanent lung damage.

Where did you see that? I have not seen anything like that reported and I feel like that would be pretty important information https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/as-coronavirus-spreads-m...

They say in the article that you linked that it looks like 20% of cases are severe and that the mortality rate is around 3% (though that is probably high because we are still early on in the epidemic). Last flu season around 1.4% of symptomatic cases ended up in the hospital and less than .1% of symptomatic cases ended with death. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

As for the 5% permanent lung damage figure, ARDS is found in around 20% of cases with mechanical ventilation for around 12.3% (https://www.uptodate.com/contents/coronavirus-disease-2019-c...)

Survivors of ARDS often have decreased quality of life including lung damage and cognitive issues. I wasn't able to find percentages of these issues in covid-19-related ARDS survivors though.