I feel like we need a better metric to use when something "kills" people. When heat waves kill people, the vast majority of the time it means these people already had major health problems that (a) let the heat do more damage and (b) prevented the person from seeking help in the first place. To be clear, I'm not saying that heat wasn't the final cause, but I think it's a fair assumption that most of these people didn't have much healthy life ahead of them regardless.

Compare that to, say, a tornado that wipes out a family with 2 young kids and 2 middle-aged adults. That to me feels orders of magnitude worse, both in the violent manner of death, and the fact that these people had years and years of healthy life left.

And, to hopefully kill this anticipated straw man, I am not making the assertion that "it's no big deal" if elderly or sick people die. I am only commenting on the comparison to other forms of death, and arguing that I think it's fair to think those other forms are death are much worse if you look beyond just "number of people killed".