https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3
> YLL in heavily affected countries are 2–9 times the average seasonal influenza
And that is after all the societal changes to deal with the disease.
I personally think that YLL of 2-9x the flu after mitigations clearly justified the mitigations.
They were (IMO) justified early on when vaccines were not available and when we knew a lot less about the effective treatment regimens.
Imagine a reliable oracle tells you: "The flu season in 2025 will be 10x as bad as the typical flu season." Is that cause to shut down restaurants, bars, close offices, schools, and universities, shutdown borders, etc, etc. for 12 months to make it only 5x as bad? For me, that's cause to make sure I get the flu vaccine that year, wash my hands a little more, not go to work if I'm ill, and pet my dog.
Some jackass tried unsuccessfully to light his shoes on fire and 20 years later we're still taking our shoes off at the airport. I hope we have a more threat-appropriate response over the long-run here.
To properly debate this claim we need to know (1) the baseline -- how many YLLs are caused by flu?, and (2) how many YLLs were _saved_ by the mitigations. (Would we have had 2x more Covid deaths without them? 10x? 1.1x?)