Also note that COVID has killed more people than combat deaths in all U.S. wars combined. U.S. COVID death toll is now 826K, combat death toll for major U.S. wars is a total of 666K: 291K for WW2, 214K for the Civil War, 53K for WW1, 47K for Vietnam, 33K for Korea, and then numbers start getting negligible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

It's also passed the death toll in the U.S. from the Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed about 675K (although this was out of a smaller total population).

It doesn't take a very large death toll to have a major impact on American society.

We have and we haven't. There's been a lot of apathy about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, interventions in Syria and Libya etc which have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands probably millions of people. Millions of children dying of easily preventable diseases. If we dismiss that and say oh well we're not sensitive to deaths of others, only our fellow countrymen that's also not true. Deaths caused tobacco, obesity, alcohol, and drugs cause an entire COVID pandemic of deaths every 9 months or so, ongoing, forever (in the US). Even deaths caused by flu kill one of those 50k wars worth of people every couple of years and people are pretty blase about that. Staggering gun murder rates among black American communities (often times I see these discussed it's dismissed with "oh that's mostly gang related"!!).

So I don't think we're necessarily all that sensitive to death, although we I suppose if it's highly publicized and pushed (like war deaths or non-gang-related murders). We're much more sensitive to fear, which is perception of risk (which obviously includes mortality), but it is also very strongly driven by the amount and tone of news coverage, politicians, social media, etc.

Not to comment on the merits of the response to covid or any of these other issues or whether fear is justified, but the reason why economies were shut down for covid was because of fear not deaths.