> People using the "they were going to die anyway" argument need to explain why they didn't die last year, or next year, but died this year, and died in huge nu

> People using the "they were going to die anyway" argument need to explain why they didn't die last year, or next year, but died this year, and died in huge numbers. Excess mortality is pretty high. That's not the argument I am making. A lot of older people indeed died sooner than they otherwise would have. COVID is statistically more dangerous to them than Influenza, but also COVID spreads more rapidly than Influenza in a population with zero immunity. > Research tells us people are dying more than 10 years early. This is significantly lower than the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, which averaged above 20 YLL per case: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3792731/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3792731/ This underlines my point that for younger age groups, COVID is statistically less dangerous than Influenza. Again, the question is not whether COVID is dangerous. It certainly is. The question is, how dangerous?