[afavour]

> when 80,000 Americans died over a ~6 month flu season

Where are you getting that number? CDC estimates 27k:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

which puts it below current COVID numbers by a big chunk.

> We didn’t keep kids from school

At this point schools are largely closed because there are too many teachers out sick to teach effectively. There isn't a particularly simple answer here.

[disambiguation]

Weird, here's another CDC source that cites a non-finalized estimate of 61k (45k - 95k)

The lower bound itself is higher than the 27k estimate.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html