Flu kills ~80,000/yr.
Due to its pervasiveness & mutability, we largely accept it as a danger of living and move on. Pretty much nothing we can do about it, brushing it off as “most who die would have soon anyway.”
COVID19 is still of largely unknown virulence and lethality. It hits a different category. Those dead will be in _addition_ to flu deaths. If it can be stopped, better that it is stopped - vs just letting it run rampant.
You can be wrong about how bad it is.
You can be wrong about it being “nothingburger”.
Decide which kind of wrong you’d rather be.
Upshot: be prepared to “turtle”, shelter in place, quarantine, etc. You should already have enough on hand to keep family healthy, isolated at home, for a few months - regardless of the problem.
Better to prepare and have it come to nothing than to find oneself and one’s family
dreadfully ill and unable to respond.