Agreed with your first paragraph. I don't think your comment about covid makes much sense (200K+ dead in 6 months is pretty damn dire).
Disagree. At least 450k die per year of preventable health conditions (lung cancer + obesity) and nobody bats an eye (that's 4.5M deaths per decade). The flu alone kills orders of magnitude more than covid over longer timelines. A once-in-a-lifetime virus kills medically compromised people at elevated rates for 6 months and people lose their minds? It's not rational.
These are people who didn't need to die, who wouldn't have died for another reason. Do you really place such a low price tag on people's lives? What if it were your life, would you gladly sacrifice it?
USA population was also only 100M in 1918. So 600k back then was .6% of the total population. So far covid has killed .06% of the total population, or one order of magnitude less.
"Over the past 10 years, covid killed (on average) X people per year, and the flu killed (on average) Y people per year"
Do you predict X or Y will be the higher number? Because I predict Y will be the higher number. And if not in the decade timeframe, certainly Y would be higher in the century timeframe.