It's surprising how many people are asking why it's a story. It's a story because people's perception is that COVID is a hugely deadly, once in a lifetime dise

It's surprising how many people are asking why it's a story. It's a story because people's perception is that COVID is a hugely deadly, once in a lifetime disease that justifies wildly extreme measures. Yet, when put in context, it can end up looking less serious than other health problems that are much more familiar to us. That's surprising and thus newsworthy. This is something critical thinkers have been flagging up all year: the numbers are low. They're especially low compared to predictions but they're low in an absolute sense as well, usually below a host of other regular killers. Many of the headline stats disguise this fact, like the oft quoted "COVID deaths" number that is picking up a lot of people who died of old age because doctors aren't allowed to write that anymore. On death certificates every death must have a cause because if there's a cause it can be fixed. This is an interesting health care industry mentality, that nobody ever dies because everyone dies, instead they died for a fixable reason, but beyond the philosophical questions that poses it also leads to this problem whereby people see the numbers and assume every "COVID death" could have been prevented. The "it's just a flu" meme comes about because the numbers of excess deaths are in most places so low that this is a pretty reasonable comparison. In America it looks like that isn't the case, but there's some suggestion now that there has been a pretty steady ~1.2% y/o/y increase in deaths for many years now, so we'd expect an "excess death" in the USA of 1.2% anyway. This is unlike in most countries where death rates have been falling, which is why it yields a confused picture.