Lie being the operant word. No one “thought” this disease was like the flu. That idea was pushed to minimize people’s impressions of COVID in order to jibe them up with Trump’s minimizing its threat. It was pushed to save Trump’s face. The disease defined itself long before it came to the USA. There’s no excuse for flu comparisons or comparisons to other pandemics. Those are history. COVID is now.
Kudlow is approaching COVID strictly from an economic / money position. What he doesn’t get is “opening the economy to save it” is exactly what will break it. If you open the economy you give COVID what it needs to explode. People in close association with each other. If you do that you’ll flood the healthcare industry with cases and break it. A broken healthcare system in the midst of a pandemic…a broken economy. The idea behind “flattening the curve” is not to end up with a curve with less area under it than if we just let it rip. It’s to drag that area out along the X axis so we don’t flood under resourced hospitals with cases. It allows medical facilities to treat patients, supply themselves and allocate critical but limited equipment ( like ventilators ) to more folks. So you “social distance” to save the economy.
COVID is a virus. It does whatever Mother Nature had in mind for it. You manage it as such.