Yes, COVID-19 not the flu. INFLUENZA isn't even a coronavirus, but I feel like you're over generalizing the message, or were told a generalization of the message, which is essentially, 'we shouldn't let this become more of a media driven panic than a virus like the flu or any number of actual coronaviruses, given it has a similar (and likely lower once we have some time behind us) death rate and rate of transmission as the flu. If you charted all the infectious diseases on a graph of morbidity and contagiousness, it would land near the flu.' If you've heard flu mentioned in context to this coronavirus it was likely for that reason, or I've heard they do share similar symptoms since they're both infectious respiratory illnesses. The whole point is it's a novel coronavirus, we need to know more, which is scary and something we need to address by understanding it and creating vaccines and palliative care to deal with it. Not closing down the world and tanking markets and caving in to panic. We've been down this road with SARS and mers in the last decade, among many others before that still exist in the wild with higher morbidity and that are more infectious. What was different then, compared to now? The level of over blown Chicken Little shit from the media is just amazing to witness. Of course politicians leap to take the harshest tack they think is publicly acceptable in their country to "control" the outbreak once markets get disrupted, like shutting off all of Italy or closing European travel for 30 days, because the reality is nobody can disprove that it was effective once panic has subsided and the crisis 'averted'. They can then claim personal success. Anyways, back to the original point - I don't think tons of people are out there saying that coronavirus is just some made up name for the flu or a fake virus. Besides the fact you can easily Google to learn influenza is not a coronavirus what would even be the point of claiming it was?