The flu is no slouch. I’m cherry picking a bit but for the US in 2017-2018:

“CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2017–2018 season was high with an estimated 45 million people getting sick with influenza, 21 million people going to a health care provider, 810,000 hospitalizations, and 61,000 deaths from influenza.”

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden-averted/2017-2018.htm

The panic is at least in part responsible for the present havoc that has been caused to the healthcare system (again in the US). Forecast havoc is all disease.

Interesting side effect of the social distancing is that it has materially reduced influenza numbers as well. Take a look at some of the recent stats at https://healthweather.us. Many states are dropping below average fever counts.

Except Florida.

flu already was wreaking massive havoc, it's just a cost we've internalized. Like driving.

Part of that is having the hospital capacity for seasonal flu and accident victims. We're prepared for that. Coronavirus adding more cases will soon overwhelm hospitals in major US cities, at which point they will have to start triaging patients like they are in Italy.

Presumably if this became the new norm then we would up our hospital capacity to match and then re-adjust our life expectancy numbers as well.

By capacity I mean during flu season we don't run out of hospital beds when people with serious flu complications need them.

By that definition then "not having capacity" means that people who go to the ER have to get turned away based on medical triaging.

Hospitals often have to set up tents in parking lots to deal with flu cases when the influx is much higher than average. We don't provision for peak flu; we provision for something less than the flu average.

Yes, we do. In the typical flu season, everyone who needs a hospital bed can get one. Flu season happens every year, we have planned and prepared for it. We have not prepared for the load that COVID places on our resources.

Nobody who is working in the ICUs in the outbreak areas shares that opinion. It's not a normal flu season for them. It's not business as usual.

I never said it was a "normal flu season". I just said we've sort of factored-in the costs (in our heads) about flu.

I think what folks working in ICUs think about flu is probably more complex than what they are saying right now; most people in ICUs are dealing with clear and present dangers with the technical systems that they have. What matters more is researchers and folks who do aggregate analysis of costs on a countrywide or larger basis, averaged over longer times, and considering second-order effects.