Media aren't alarmist enough. They don't understand how exponential growth works. Will this epidemic kill as much as the Spanish flu in absolute sense? Probably, especially if you factor in all the deaths from other causes that happened because the hospital system was DDoSed. In relative sense? Maybe not, there was ~4x less people back then.

> It's good to take all the right precautions, but we aren't living in the early 19th/20th century anymore.

Exactly. 19th and early 20th century would fare better. Yes, the virus would kill more of the infected people. But it also wouldn't travel as far and as fast, and wouldn't be damaging national economies so badly. Or threatening the food security of so many people (both in absolute and relative terms).

> We have modern medicine, proper hygiene, and a much faster rate of information transfer than we ever have before.

We also have just-in-time supply chains and lean philosophy of "cutting out fat" - i.e. any spare capacity in the system that could help with a crisis. Modern medicine won't do much if you use it all up in a week, and more won't be coming for another couple of months if at all. Faster information transfer won't help you if you have barely enough doctors to staff hospitals at regular load, forget the peak load during a pandemic (and note that many doctors will catch it and go out of circulation).