The latter point is precisely why I was careful to say "pandemic flu" when responding to the above. But yes, the point is very valid. A novel disease with the same IFR of an established disease will kill a lot more in the year that it is introduced.

(BTW, something that occurred to me is that the fact that infants are largely spared from COVID-19 is even more of a blessing than it already seems. Once this passes through our population, new infections will be in those who are not immune which will primarily be infants/young children, who we know thus far have had really good outcomes relative to adults. That means the enduring legacy of this will be much better than what we see with Influenza)

> One, saying something that is 300% larger than another is “similar” is stretching the definition of similarity.

I defined "ballpark" in the article as less than an order of magnitude. But, I think this is a thought exercise that might help:

Imagine that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't exist, but we learn that this flu season is going to be extra deadly. Instead of the ~50k of deaths last year, we know that there will be ~150k deaths.

Would we rationally take the same extreme of measures that we have taken for Covid? (Or, conversely, should we already have been taking these measures for past flu seasons)?

Also I think you're very aware of this, but just for any on-lookers: don't look at the flu comparisons as intending to minimize COVID-19; but rather comparing to flu gives us an existing mental model that most people are familiar with that helps us figure out what measures make sense and what don't.