40,000 die on our streets every year. Our pants are quite dry.
This is an exogenous event, which will kill a lot of people in short time, on top of the usual circumstances. A natural disaster. A war.
3000 Americans died, a Trillion USD was spent on two wars, civil liberties were irrevocably destroyed (DHS, etc).
The USA never suffered casualties of 1+mil ever. Ask the old Europeans how that feels.
For one thing, it should be easy to prevent the latter whereas it's far from clear whether there's much we can do about the former.
Being dead is absolutely comparable with being dead though, no matter what lead there. It's the absence of a person that matters, to the people who miss them, not what people removed from that think about it in the abstract.
I lost my father through a completely stupid accident, made possible through carelessness on his behalf I think. If he had been murdered by someone, I would have felt a lot of hate, and that would have sucked and damaged me no doubt -- but the grief of missing someone is still the same, and I'd say the difference between murder and an accident are both tiny pebbles compared to a person being gone. Even if he had died to save 1000 million people, I would miss him exactly the same.
If a serial killer murders your father, we're going to react differently than if your father dies of a heart attack.
What matters, to me, is that I can no longer speak to a person. How that came about is very, very minor compared to that. Even knowing that we all will die some day does not change the simple, banal, them-shaped gap someone leaves. That gap is what remains, what created it does not. I'm just speaking for myself, but that I do.
How and why people die is no doubt very important when it comes to very removed people using tragedies, which was very much the case with 9/11. For them it's the other way around: the gap never really mattered and is soon utterly forgotten, while that evil deed none of us most forget remains as long as it's useful. I remember families of victims speaking out against war after 9/11, and mostly being ignored by a nation angry on their behalf. The dead were exploited more than honored, if you ask me.
Proportionately speaking, that estimate is on par with the amount of American deaths per total population during WW2 and something like 1/7 the American deaths per total population during the civil war.
You think if they had the choice they would have rather sat at home watching netflix?
We don't actually know that will happen with the virus, it could become like the flu and continue killing every year. We hope natural immunity will last but that is far from a given, it may only last months or years. A vaccine is also not a given, it's older brother SARS doesn't have one.
5 billion hosts gives an awful lot of room for mutations to occur, this thing is still in a new environment it's not adapted to.
Then there's the lasting health effects, it's possible it causes permanent lung damage and we have no idea if it leaves any landmines behind like chickenpox does.
If so we're pretty thoroughly fucked. We aren't going to manage to wipe out this virus by shutting down the developed worlds economy's because the rest of the world (especially warzones and the like) isn't capable of doing the same. We can't keep the economy shut down forever to prevent spread in the developed world and not all starve to death.
I'd argue that the best response should that turn out to be true is to pour more resources into medical research until we do find a vaccine... which rather requires having functional stable economies instead of us all going bankrupt because we shut them down.