The plans the US already has for a flu pandemic should mostly carry over, no? COVID is probably worse than the seasonal flu, but it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do.
Are you confident in this administrations ability to handle national crisis in light of the funding and personnel cuts mentioned in the above article?
Also, why has the CDC testing so botched thus far?
I think the issue is that we don't know yet how bad COVID-19 is. China is hiding stuff and it's not clear what is going on over there. There are also some uncomfortable, if true, things about it: like asymptomatic transmission for 2 weeks and ability to survive on surfaces for 5 days on certain conditions.
By about 3-4 orders of magnitude, it is. The flu tends to kill about 60K people annually and most of those are old or very young or already had a compromised immune system. This is with the figures known so far and before there is a vaccine around 2-3%. If left unchecked it would overwhelm available health care capacity pretty quickly.
The Chinese mis-handled this. But it would be a mistake to think that the west is super prepared for something like this compared to China. ICU capacity is limited, test capacity is limited. Our advantages are mostly in more transparent messaging and wealth. Those two will have a big impact on the economic and health care aspects but it may not be enough to drop this down to the level of yet another flu.
I don't think you're getting your numbers from an accurate source either. The flu kills a lot more than 6k people by every estimate I've seen.
Also, 'pandemic' is just about the geographic spread, not about the mortality or the rate of infection.
If this thing keeps going like it has for the last couple of weeks then it will make the last H1N1 pandemic look like a walk in the park. The final count on that was 100's of thousands dead in 199 different countries. And it didn't take off nearly as fast as this.
There's still a lot of uncertainty around the fatality rate here. For cases outside China, the fatality rate so far is about .2%, compared to about .1% for seasonal influenza. By contrast, in Hubei the reported fatality rate is around 4-5%. (Numbers are as of last week so might be slightly outdated now).
My guess is that the 2-3% estimate is too high. In Hubei there is probably a reporting bias towards counting the more sick cases -- mild or asymptomatic COVID cases are probably being reported less often.
I sincerely hope you are right. Those are numbers that when extrapolated to global scale are too horrific to even contemplate.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-did-1918-flu-kill...
This is one of the reasons why HIV spread was not as bad as it could have been in Western Europe where exposure to a disease still gave some benefits many centuries later:
https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050307/full/news050307-15.h...
If we widen this slightly to healthy but unvaccinated 29 year olds we do start to see deaths from flu.
Being both more virulent and having a fatality rate at least 20 times greater means it is definitely outside the range of what flu does.