There's also the issue that while it's deadlier than the flu, it's not that much deadlier, so people are genuinely looking at death rates and making different value judgements on if various restrictions are worth it.
From just a week ago: "Covid deaths three times higher than flu and pneumonia"[1]
And that's taking in to account all the lockdown, mask-wearing, and social distancing measures. Without those it'd be even worse.
And yet if COVID-19 was no more dangerous than the flu you'd expect to see equal result form those mask wearing and social distancing measures.. but you don't.
COVID-19 is just way more deadly.
Less than 217000 people died of COVID-19 during the epidemic in the USA while some 1.5 million people died from other causes in the same time frame. Why the obsession with COVID-19?
Go ahead, make people not take you seriously.
I felt this was a really interesting piece explaining how covid deaths are reported deaths versus flu deaths are just estimated and how the two are very different numbers to base comparisons off.
I also kind of liked how the article was written with the narrative of the eureka moment in realising how the stats were not comparable.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...
> I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.
> The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.