> accepts 22k deaths a year without blinking The US spends a lot of effort trying to convince people to get flu shots, take antivirals if they get sick, and st

> accepts 22k deaths a year without blinking The US spends a lot of effort trying to convince people to get flu shots, take antivirals if they get sick, and stay away from vulnerable populations while contagious; hospitals prepare extensively for increased use during flu season (and medical workers are vaccinated, making flu much less personally risky for them), widely distribute easy-to-administer flu tests, treat people and keep them alive as best they can, etc. Estimated flu death numbers are also not comparable to current reported Covid death numbers, because they include a ton of guesswork, since many of the people who die while infected with flu officially succumb to some other condition (according to death certificates). We don’t go into total economic lockdown for 2 months per year, because it would be impossible to enforce and extremely expensive, but we sure did during the last comparable pandemic, the 1918 flu. Currently (and this will hopefully change as medical knowledge improves), Covid seems to be more than 10x more deadly than seasonal flu for most demographic groups. In an unchecked Covid epidemic (with hospitals overwhelmed) it appears that on the order of 1% of the population dies. (This has happened in some towns in Italy, where a very high percentage of the population was likely infected.) > lockdown will ultimately spread misery Having 1% of the entire population die within a matter of months is going to cause an extremely severe economic shock with or without official actions.