[fullstackchris]

That's what I'm saying. (Probably going to get downvoted to smithereens) but how can COVID-19 _which is of the same nature of thousands of other known corona viruses_ be so diabolically different than the ones we know about?

I'd bet all these worst-case symptoms are _also_ present in those hit badly by the flu or other corona viruses.

Indeed, after some googling, same is true for H1N1:

https://www.kidney.org/news/newsroom/nr/H1N1Patients

and the flu:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/984071

These type of articles posted by OP are mostly clickbait. While they ARE true, it's also true for all similar diseases.

[PeterisP]

The difference is one of scale - out of people infected with seasonal flu, very few are hit really badly by it. As Covid is creating more of the severe cases than flu (despite having infected - yet - much less people than flu), the qualitatively similar effect is much more important simply because it will be affecting potentially much more peope depending on how the world handling of Covid turns out.

[hprotagonist]

why is this different? because unlike the flu, sars-cov-2 has 8.5 billion immunologically naive hosts.

[votepaunchy]

Does this count include cats?