Yes, thats what I was talking about many times.
This is still a superficial comparison, and you need much more data to make anything useful about it or else it becomes a misleading over-simplification. Which is why listening to experts and evaluating their advice on the evidence they present is the less risky option, in comparison with basic number crunching of laypeople on TT forums.
Let's say 700 people have died so far in 2020 in Cali of the flu. How many people were infected? How long has the flu season been going on for? What is the death rate, incubation period, infection vector, demographic variation?
Once you know these things (and many more factors), you can compare to the same data for corona and make some almost-sensible decisions about advice to give to the public, and perhaps go further and postpone events, declare emergencies, and so on.
If you don't know these things, then just counting the number of deaths means very little when people in positions of responsibility have to make their decisions. They have to project forward and judge how bad things could get, not say "1 death so far vs 700 for flu, so we don't need to do X". The current evidence suggests that treating corona in the same way as flu will result in many
more deaths. It's possible to reduce these
additional fatalities by taking some steps now to contain and delay the spread. Nothing massive - reinforce basic hygiene advice, contain people's movement in known hotspots, avoid large congregations of people in high risk areas, and so on.
The best modelling we have available now shows corona to have the potential to be much worse than seasonal flu. Comparing it to flu stats in an effort to downplay the risks is just irresponsible. It's possible to influence the public's behaviour in a say which doesn't incite panic, if done properly.
