OK. I'm not going to mock you. I'm going to roll some things by you so you can consider them.

The reason the flu kills so many people each year is not because it is particularly virulent, the last really bad flu bug was in 1918... and it killed about 2% of the world's population. That is bad.

The flu kills so many people because it is already out there in the population. Its everywhere. The flu never goes away, it just mutates and comes back with a new strain.

The reason why we should be concerned about the coronavirus is that is particularly deadly and it is still spreading. Estimates are that about 126,000 people have it. The death total is 8,600 or so. That is a bit more than 3%.

You might not think so, but 3% is some scary shite. If you had a 3% chance of having your balls ripped off and eaten by a rabid bear you'd be all in favor of getting this rabid bear problem fixed.

It is a particular concern here because we don't have enough testing kits to test for it adequately. Places like Australia and South Korea have fairly low death rates from this because they churned out a ton of testing kits and tested everything that moved.

Italy, on the other hand, slashed funding for their hospitals in recent years and gutted their pandemic response capabilities. They are getting hammered right now. Considering that we slashed and burned CDC funding over the last few years and eliminated the NSC official who was supposed to over see pandemic response... this is a concern.

Am I saying panic? No. It will be a rough couple of months but we will get through this. That having been said you want to treat this like a serious problem so it won't turn into a serious problem.