Here's my question: If we had real-time dashboards and 24/7 news coverage of every flu case, hospitalization, and flu death... would it look much different? I think it would actually look much worse.
Reported case mortality of H1N1 during the pandemic was similarly upwards of ~5% in some countries, [2] although later retrospective studies found that H1N1 was actually less lethal than a typical flu season (0.01-0.08%). [3]
ICU utilization was very significant in some countries, e.g. 30 people per million admitted to the ICU [4]. (Italy is currently at 14 per million.)
Hospitals definitely had to adopt "surge management" although in 2009 it often had as much to due with managing fear and panic as it did with getting people access to ventilators. [5]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_in_India
[3] - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...
[4] - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0908481
[5] -https://www.reliasmedia.com/articles/136827-the-next-pandemi...
There's plenty of evidence that this is much worse than the flu. R0 is >2, compared to 1.3. Mortality rate seems to be at least 5x higher. And those are low bounds. And this is all adding to the regular load on hospitals. It has observably overloaded hospital capacity in China and Italy.
[1]: https://www.chron.com/news/education/article/Washington-viru...