It does matter. The red death is worse, but exaggerating it doesn’t help the economy. The red death will have 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the US by a variety of estimates. The worst flu season has 80,000 deaths in the US.
A minor point: What year was 80k? I looked on CDC’s website and could only find data going back to 2010-2011. 2017-18 has been revised down to 61k - the worst in the group. (I believe Redfield said 80k (widely quoted), but that was over a year ago.)
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html