Unless you believe that 90% of the excess deaths were not directly related to COVID, your implied point falls flat.
Edit: There were 1.1 million COVID deaths in the USA alone.
Edit: There were 1.1 million COVID deaths in the USA alone.
Pink is total; orange is COVID; blue is non-COVID attributed excess.
https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/covid-mortality-...
If you told people "hey, this year the flu is going to be very bad, probably killing 10 times as many people" would the average response be to close schools and many businesses for over a year? Or would the response be to limit lockdowns to vulnerable populations, rather than blanket lockdowns on most of society?
Ionnadis was slammed for claiming such a low IFR of 0.27%. But later studies have since reaffirmed his estimates: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9613797/ Even when restricting the analysis to the period before vaccinations, the IFR was between 0.3% and 0.4%. Ionnadis was way closer to the mark than the claims of 1.0 or 1.5% IFR that were common at the time.
edit: COVID placed a 20x burden on hospitals versus the flu even with lockdowns. That's without counting the increased difficulty of treating a novel disease, and increased time in hospitals for covid vs flu.