Putting 1/700 a year death from covid into context of our overall mortality rate: 1,027.0 deaths per 100,000 population [0]
I know more under 40 that have died from overdose in the past two years than I know that have died from covid (which is 0)
https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/04/29/fact-check-did-...
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...
Covid skewed old.
No amount of screeching will change the fact that people are far more mentally prepared for grandma to keel over with little warning than they are to lose a random uncle or coworker.
That depends. If a coworker dies because they did drugs, you might say to yourself "I'm safe from that mode of death as long as I don't do drugs".
If a random coworker dies because of Covid that they caught on the job, you might say to yourself "I'm next", the result being existential dread and anxiety.
It's true covid skewed old, but people quote the stats of dead young people in the last 2 years as if people were mentally prepared for that. Overdoses don't kill young families in a matter of weeks, but Covid did. Overdoses don't bring down 43 teachers in a school system over the course of a few months, whose average age was 46, but Covid did that. Covid brought all kinds of unique and deep tragedies that aren't reflected in the stats, and people are still dealing with the emotional fallout.
Again I understand that covid skewed old, but grandma is already dead and has been since before Covid. Now my parents are "old" at 65, but I'm not mentally prepared for them to die at all. If their parents are any indication I still have a good 20 years left with them, and so I get really upset when people try to discount their lives as if they wouldn't be missed if they were to die from Covid, or if somehow that's just nature taking its course. Really this shouldn't be a contest of whose death counts more to society.
But public health policy doesn't need to be structured around these gut feelings of whose life is more or less valuable or whose death is more or less expected.
To the larger dialogue about protective measures, I understand the claim that "I'm young, my risk of severe disease or death is low. So I need no precautions." But unless you live in isolation, your infection increases my risk of infection. My protective measures reduce that risk but do not implement. And I have elderly parents, in their 90's. They're vaccinated and reasonably cautious. They're also mostly independent and functional. But they aren't particularly ready to die. So despite the relaxation in required protective measures, I wear an N95 in indoor spaces outside my house so that I don't inadvertently infect them. I've also had encounters where I've been yelled at by random strangers for doing so. Apparently for some, the right to choose is not reciprocal - "I would like to choose not to do [x] but I'd also like to compel you do likewise."
Further apples to apples comparison is tough because kids 0-5 die of COVID but the US does not record any death below age 5 as a suicide.
A related comparison: more school age children died of COVID during the pandemic than have ever across all history died from school shootings.