Still wow. Statistics are wonderful if used correctly, but sorry Sparky, as they say, ...."this is not a drill!"
Look up the word P-A-N-D-E-M-I-C. There is a reason that neither SARS nor MERS were called or classed as a pandemic....because they were
NOT pandemics.
H1N1 is a strain of influenza, and the pandemic was in 2009, not 2010.....we have been dealing with those for many years and have vaccines. We have a comfort level from years of observation. We simply are in uncharted waters on COVID-19.
As for media attention, it was a HUGE story in 2009.
Much of the concern with the impact of COVID-19 is that we are still in flu season, and our health care systems are designed to cope with that blip; this new one puts the whole system into Code Black.
The MERS outbreak of 2009 which you cite would have occurred several years before that virus was actually identified.
Since 2012 when it made the WHO list, there have been fewer than 2500 confirmed MERS cases worldwide. That is from 2012-2020....a bad year has maybe 400 cases worldwide . Of these, only 2....yes 2... cases were confirmed in the USA...in 8 years.
SARS had fewer than 8100 cases worldwide in the 2003-4 outbreak. Since then there have been a handful of confirmed cases only....a "whopping" 29 total from the USA.
Those numbers were the summation of the entire acknowledged duration of those outbreaks.
re: COVID-19, No responsible person uses the term "Mortality Rate" with such a small sample size of data!
We are mere months in to this current pandemic and there are already more cases in the USA alone than in both examples of coronaviruses that you referenced....worldwide. In fact, there are more than 3x more confirmed COVID-19 cases in the USA now than the worldwide sum total of SARS and MERS.
As far as SARS and MERS hysteria, in the US there was little if any due to the numbers, but worldwide there was lots....here in Canada SARS was a big deal.
I am confidant that the light will finally go on and people will start to get the message; and it is great that the Denier-in-Chief is finally listening to the experts, but it is going to be a rocky road. Maybe if social-distancing could be expanded to include Twitter....
Stay well everybody; look after yourselves, your families, and your neighbours.