The main thing I've concluded based on people's reaction to the death tolls is that much of our population has not come to terms with their mortality and hate being reminded of it.
So i guess we don't need drunk driving laws... only about 10,000 people a year die in the US from drunk drivers, they were going to die anyway. The world keeps on moving.
No reason to work on curing cancer. Dead someday anyway.
Yes, death comes to us all. That has no bearing on whether we should work to prevent death.
So assuming that 400k figure is excess mortality, that means 17% more people died last year than normal.
That is tragic, but the way it gets talked about, you would think we were at 10x or more.
Then again, we've invaded foreign countries and sacrificed our civil liberties ("war on terror") for way less deaths than that.
Makes you wonder why we are always so quick to trade away our freedoms...
Also, we did not ‘lose’ a year of life.