[umvi]

> 35k per year from influenza is literally an order of magnitude less than the current death toll

But it kills consistently year after year, decade after decade. Influenza has been consistently killing for how many years in a row before covid showed up? So really, the "current death toll" of the flu is in the many millions by now. Unless you reset the count after every year in which case covid's death count doesn't get to keep ticking up forever either and needs to reset to 0 at some year boundary.

> 675k Americans died in the 1918 Flu, and we’re still talking about that one.

And in 1918 America had less than one third the current population. 675k out of 100M is way deadlier than 500k out of 350M. Also we weren't really "talking about it" until very recently. Prior to 2020 almost nobody talked about it except people who study public health.

[willyt]

Well maybe you didn’t study have to study history at school. But I did and we learnt that the 1918 flu killed more people than WW1.

[umvi]

> But I did and we learnt that the 1918 flu killed more people than WW1.

Hmm, but I would argue there's a difference between young healthy people dying en masse (war) and mainly the sickly and elderly dying (pandemic). It feels awfully utilitarian to distill it down to this, but I'm sorry, a healthy 18 year old dying from a bullet is way worse than a 70 year old dying of a disease, especially from a "years of life lost" perspective.

In my view, with covid, it's mostly the elderly that got a few years cut short, but most of them would have died within the next decade anyway of something else (including "age") and I predict we will see "negative excess deaths" in the coming years for that very reason.

[mplanchard]

Same! And on top of this, 500k is more Americans than died in WWII. It’s true the proportions are a bit different due to population growth, but we can’t pretend like it’s anything but a staggering number of people