>The Hong Kong Flu caused more deaths than are projected for this current pandemic and yet, at the time, no one thought of bringing entire economies to a halt.

The other way to look at it, even with the quarentine this pandemic will kill a similar number of people.

If the reports were true that "half the workers were in bed," that would mean there were millions of cases, yet only ~50k deaths. Compare that to the current pandemic, where France has 25k deaths in ~150k cases.