but I saw a great explanation on a bbc interview last night. That essentially, this is worse than the flu and people are freaking out BECAUSE right now, with the scant knowledge that has been collected, best case scenario is a fatality rate of 1.0% of those infected.

In 2018-2019, the flu was attributed to 34,200 deaths in the USA at a fatality rate of 0.1%. If you had a similar number of people infected with COVID-19, you'd expect 342,000 fatalities in the USA alone. That's if the 1.0% fatality rate is true, which they're not sure it is. If that increases to the 3.0% some speculate it may be then you're looking at 1,000,000 fatalities in the USA alone.

COVID-19 does not appear as infectious as the flu but we also have no vaccine to help against the infection like we do with the flu. Everyone is flying blind and our medical system can't handle 1,000,000 infectious disease fatalities let alone the people that they'd need to hospitalize that wouldn't die.

That's why they're freaking out and that's why they're shutting all large gatherings down. The places where they've had the most success containing the spread has been done with quarantines and social distancing(Singapore, China---once they got their response going, Hong Kong)