> there are more than a quarter million Americans that would certainly disagree with you were they still alive to do so

It's not like Americans are known for taking particularly good care of themselves.

I'm not sure of any scenario once community spread was rampant across the nation where substantial numbers of Americans wouldn't have died.

Let's not forget this nation has been supposedly battling an "obesity epidemic" for pretty much my entire adult life (I'm >40), and the fact that Dialysis centers have become a common sight throughout the nation. These problems existed prior to COVID-19, in many ways this is Americans sleeping in their own bed decades in the making.

Do you have a source for this? I'm not aware of any estimates that attribute almost 100% of US deaths to our poor public health response. That would imply that there was a realistic scenario in which we'd have roughly zero deaths. Though there are countries that managed this, I've yet to see any evidence that this is _entirely_ attributable to public health levers (and there are a few characteristics in common among many of them: many are small islands, many had been hit badly by pandemics in the past, almost all are East Asian, and IIRC none of them are large federal systems, a massive exogenous variable when it comes to governance).

Or perhaps you're you're interpreting the parent comment overliterally? I understood it to mean that Coronavirus restrictions are safety theater, not that the virus itself is a fantasy.

I have no doubt. That's why I said 'mostly'. It's a cold. A bad one, for some. Mostly, we perform the act of the pandemic. The acts offer confidence to the neurotic.

And every other natural death in the last 1000 years? Are they too entitled to theoretical disgruntlement?