1. That isn't the point that was being made. Matthew McCleod argued that "we don't regularly have ICUs stuffed full of people with influenza", and that HN is full of people who reject the "prevailing wisdom" just for the sake of it. Neither is the case, and my post provides plenty of evidence to reject the belief about hospitals (which is driven by media stories not actual overload - in the UK hospitals are being reported as about to overflow although they have normal load for this time of year, i.e. the reports are misleading).
2. Your data is comparing apples and oranges. Nowhere has ever made the kind of testing effort being made for COVID. We really have no idea how many people catch or die from flu because it's not really tracked to the same level of effort. Meanwhile COVID reporting has been hopelessly inflated by a medical establishment that takes every option to increase reported numbers. People are "COVID hospitalisations" if they're admitted with a broken arm and happen to test positive even though they don't seem to be sick, they are "COVID deaths" if they get shot and test positive at time of death. They have "COVID" the disease even if no doctor ever diagnosed them based purely on fragments of RNA found in a blood sample, using a test with unknown and it seems wildly varying false positive rates, that's been ramped up well beyond the max sensitivity many PCR experts actually recommend.
Reported COVID numbers really can't be compared numerically to anything historical at this point. They are "meaningful" only when compared against each other and even then there are difficulties as countries report things differently. For instance the numbers were inflated in the UK by at least 5000 deaths because the health agency defined COVID as a terminal disease. Once you tested positive, for the rest of your life your death would be marked a COVID death regardless of how much later you died or what of. They "fixed" this by changing forever to 28 days, which is still not a valid way to measure who died of what. That's how you get the New York Times reporting a list of people who died of COVID in which the sixth person on the list was a homicide victim.
Fundamentally, if you look at excess death numbers in a lot of countries, they look like flu season. Reported IFRs have continuously fallen and even the establishment figures are now in range of a strong flu season, not anything more. That's why people keep comparing it to flu.
> CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2018–2019 season included an estimated 35.5 million people getting sick with influenza, 16.5 million people going to a health care provider for their illness, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths from influenza
Covid19 has killed ~220,000 people so far in 2020 in the US.
From the same article you quoted about the epidemic in California (from 2018, mid-January):
> This year's outbreak is on track to becoming one of the worst flu seasons in recent history due to a deadly strand that has so far killed 85 adults and 20 children nationwide as the numbers continue to climb.
Covid19 has killed ~16,000 people so far in 2020 in California.
Related to the UK 2017-18 flu season that saw hospitals stretched ( https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/18/flu-outbreak... ):
> After 35 more deaths last week, 120 people across the country have died of flu-related symptoms since early October, compared with 45 in the same period in 2016-17.
Covid19 has killed ~43,000 people in the UK so far in 2020.
For the France 2016-2017 flu epidemic ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321906828_Influenza... ):
> During the epidemic wave, a marked excess mortality estimate at 14,400 deaths attributable to influenza was observed.
Covid19 has killed ~34,000 people in France in 2020 so far.
Point being, perhaps it is the old news that were a bit exaggerated; either way, Covid19 is measurably worse than then any recent flu, and this is after extreme lockdown measures compared to any flu pandemic in living memory.
Note: I am fully aware that some of the lower numbers are partial numbers from about the middle of the flu season. Feel free to look up the final numbers for that season as well - they will be at worst half the Covid19 numbers.