Why isn't this COVID 19 like HINI Swine flu? or any other flu?

Updated: 5/11/20    
 There is a dangerous pitch by right-wing media and earlier by others on FOX.attempting to play down the impact of COVID.  No big deal " This COVID is just like any other flu pandemic such as HINI and so why the panic. COVID-19 must be being hyped because of liberal politics to make Trump look bad. "  Go ahead and rally protest demonstrations against governor's stay at home orders the President urges on tweets. "Don't be ignorant. It would not be good for your health," is my answer to those who fall for it. Per Jerad Polis, Colorado Governor, on Colorado Public Radio May 11, " of seniors who get the virus, 3 or 4 will end up in the hospital; for non-seniors, the odds are one in ten. This is not like any other flu".
I got a vaccination for swine flu., HINI There is none for coronavirus yet. As a novel virus, no one has immunity. This virus is a different animal. It is more infectious, though it is so new, the estimates vary and they may vary from place to place.  The reproduction number for swine flue, the number one person can infect is 1.75.(The R0 factor; pronounced R naught)  With coronavirus, one carrier can infect more than 3.5, per some estimates. The CDC was on top of the swine flu that emerged in the US in April.2009..had treatment methods identified by May and a vaccine developed by September. All treatment drugs for COVID 19 none, but In clinical trials. Vaccine for COVID 19, a year and a half away.  Swine flu timeline is from the CDC website.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-pandemic-timeline.html
https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/rounds/how-scientists-quantify-intensity-of-an-outbreak-like-covid-19  and the swine flu R0 factor is from Wikipedia with documented references. Any R0 factor under 1 means the virus is dying out.

The BS still being the spiel from Trump media is still COVID was not worse than flu. This from Scientific American: "If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse."
If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.

My family is a blessing; I have in my own immediate family, a team of experts helpful for writing my blog and columns. One daughter is an MBA in health administration and part of her curriculum was epidemiology. She took the threat of COVID -19 seriously and knew the death rate targeted older people like her mother. A son, Harvard MBA and Stanford economics, keeps me fact-checked and grounded in business and economics. Most of his consulting business clients are small business startups, many abroad. We have first cousins and a grandson in the New York area and he splits his time between Colorado and there. What goes on in New York and Connecticut is personal to us. Fortunately, he arrived in Colorado March 3 after two weeks of travel in Turkey, Spain, Germany, and Manhattan and we both went into quarantine for two weeks in our Winter Park home at daughter's insistence...and we practiced social distancing in the same home. He was exposed many times to COVID -19 in that February trip, but he wiped down everything he could, including airline seats and trays. We consider ourselves lucky. So far so good, and I have still not left the house. Mortality for COVID in my over 80 age group is 14%. 80% of those on ventilators die.

     From my earlier blog posting in March.: We have heard of historical comparisons to COVID-19 to other mega pandemics.  There are certain advantages of my living so long, but still vivid in my memory bank was the polio epidemic of the late 1940s when I was in elementary school and before Salk and his miracle vaccine freed us from fear. Like the 1940's polio, COVID- 19  has no vaccine and no medicines to stop its progression. We can only treat the symptoms and avoid those who are infected.   We did not call it social distancing then, but we did it.  It was not enforced by a government but by my parents. In sweltering summers of eastern Oklahoma, we were not able to go to swimming pools or to cool off in air-cooled movie theaters.  We could only play with our neighborhood gang.    We did not complain.  We did not try to avoid the rules.  One look at the pictures in Life Magazine of children lying in rows of iron lungs was enough to put the fear of God in us. It worked. Our neighborhood gang escaped the disease.  The irony has not escaped me.  As a child, I was the most vulnerable to polio; as a person well over 60, I am once again the most vulnerable to another deadly epidemic and I am socially distancing myself with a vengeance. March 26; https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-team-failed-nsc-pandemic-000023392.html There was a playbook to deal with a pandemic left by the Obama administration in the wake of other pandemics and ignored by Trump's.  One more example of Trump's judgment and priority failures.