Thanks, those are good examples I hadn't heard of.

From the descriptions there and coming out of Italy it should be clear that COVID-19 is much worse than the worst flu we've seen in a decade.

The only thing keeping deaths low to this point is that it isn't as widespread.

It seems comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu, which started in Kansas, except that so far it kills old people almost exclusively, not children or people in their prime. Hopefully it won't mutate.

Nevertheless, it's not a flu.

And that's a 0.2% mortality rate, still nowhere near as bad as even the lowest estimates for COVID-19.

That's a different discussion than the question if regular flu seasons can overload the healthcare systems. Yes they can, and we regularly underestimate them.

And I'd actually also disagree that this is 'nowhere near as bad' as COVID-19. In countries like Germany or South Korea the death toll with high rates of testing appears to be somewhere in the 0.2 - 1% range. That's something I would argue is a difference in quantity rather than quality, with the dangers lying in the aggregate disease burden and vulnerable populations in particular.

Something I meant to say upthread slightly and didn't:

It seems like the nature of the overloading is different.

In particular, from those reports you mentioned, it doesn't seem like staff had to decide which patients to treat or not.

With COVID-19 we are hearing reports of some patients not being treated because there is not enough capacity (either staff or equipment) and so the death rates can be very high as many people receive inadequate treatment.