Why Do News Agencies Keep Trying to Push Covid-19 is "More Deadly Than Flu"

I found this in the Washington Post in an article that is trying to scare people about COVID-19 despite the masses of serology tests that show many people have had this without symptoms. They are also trying to base their assumption there are asymptomatic carriers off of this bologna. '“I think it is the worst pandemic since 1918,” said Cecile Viboud, an epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center, alluding to the “Great Influenza” pandemic that claimed an estimated 675,000 lives in the United States.' 

Later it says '“The death rate is much, much lower,” Cuomo said Monday, referring to the serology tests. He said the New York state rate appears to be 0.5 percent — which is one death per 200 infections.

That figure is still sobering to infectious disease experts. A rate of 0.5 percent “is way more than a usual flu season and I would think way more than the ’57 or 1968 [influenza] pandemic death toll, too,” Viboud said.'  

Apparently, Viboud is another epidemiologist who hasn't done his homework and who has no clue about infectious diseases. The CDC posted in 2017-2018 that the "pandemic" flu that year reached weeks of 10.8% case mortality.

Here is what Dr. Fauci said in 2005 about the bird flu, which had a 30%-60% case mortality rate:

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Be careful. And the reason we have to be careful is that the analogy between SARS and influenza is quite imperfect. Influenza is spread easily by aerosolize. SARS, with some exceptions, is spread by droplet. So that in order for me to infect you if I had SARS, I had to really be coughing and get visible droplets to contaminate you, is the usual way it’s spread. With influenza you can get infected from me even before I start to feel sick because there’s a period of 24, maybe even 48 hours where I’m incubating the influenza. And just the normal amount of spray that goes back and forth when people talk to each other, you can actually get infected.