Though even allowing that, it’s still possible Covid-19 is worse than most viruses, as far as that sort of damage goes.
The big open question is cumulative damage from multiple COVID-19 infections.[2] There are now many people who have had COVID more than once. (US: 60% at least once, maybe 11% more than once.) A few people have had it many more times, but that seems to involve some pre-existing condition. A VA study of older veterans indicates that cumulative damage is real in older adults. As time goes on, there will be more previously healthy people who have had COVID multiple times, and this question will be answered the hard way.
[1] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27756/chapter/1
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/well/live/covid-reinfecti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-acute_infection_syndrome
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326619
Measles for example wipes out the immune systems memory of everything it has learned to defend against, leaving people newly vulnerable to everything they were immune to before:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211112-the-people-with-...
There's a good chance that a lot of the "mystery diseases" are due to longer lasting damage from viruses, to organs and to the immune system, including ordinary colds and flu. Colds and flu are probably spread via the air also, yet this also remains unstudied (otherwise known as "there is no evidence") and hospitals don't take precautions for most patients, probably because the cost would be large to treat the air in all hospital rooms. It would mean ending practices like putting two patients in each room as well. I think that in the past a lot was overlooked as being too complex to deal with ("we can't cure flu, it mutates too fast") or too costly (but so was mapping DNA), or both (drugs personalized to each persons DNA) so a certain amount of death and disability was allowed and drugs and surgery statistically only work for some people (see "number needed to treat", NNT). Now we have better tools and understanding and these things should change.
It would not.
Compared to the rest of hospital maintenance costs, UV-C hydrogen peroxide generators for the HVAC system are cheap, and effective.
In such a scenario Covid has worse impact due to the higher transmissibility. People seem to get it every 6-12 months. Flu infection is much less frequent.
A Chinese field study estimated people got the flu once every five years. It is simply much less contagious. Flu collapsed globally when countries put in place Covid precautions.
COVID does follow the same general rates of corona viruses, from what I remember. Which is to say it is higher than flu. So, I am not trying to downplay that.
That said, feels very in the weeds here. My stance is largely to have as much patience with folks as can be. I don't personally go through as much effort as many do, but I see no reason for that to be something to get upset over, either.
I think that there's no real basis to assume that, especially when young. I would expect the distribution of flu complications (externally validated, not based on self-reports) is actually worse.