This is nonsense. Are you suggesting that if this illness had all the same characteristics -- long hospital stays, long-lasting damage to the body, highly transmissible -- but didn't kill, then we would not be "shutdown"?
Wrong hill to die on, bud. 60M people got infected with Swine Flu, and nobody even thought of shutting anything down. Why? Because it was about as deadly as regular flu. So yes, deaths are the right metric to track.
Completely irrelevant. There were an estimated 274k hospitalizations from swine flu, over the course of that year. So swine flu did not have the characteristics I specified.
This is nonsense. Are you suggesting that if this illness had all the same characteristics -- long hospital stays, long-lasting damage to the body, highly transmissible -- but didn't kill, then we would not be "shutdown"?