I suspect some readers are thinking ok, so it's ~6x worse, surely that's noticeable. But the COVID numbers are seriously inflated relative to past epidemics by

I suspect some readers are thinking ok, so it's ~6x worse, surely that's noticeable. But the COVID numbers are seriously inflated relative to past epidemics by the enormous testing programme, and the way mass PCR testing has cut doctors out of the loop. These numbers of deaths are deaths in which a positive PCR test was roughly temporally co-present, regardless of what an expert on the ground said the cause of death was, which is a much weaker standard than was previously used for ascribing a cause of death. Another way to look at this is overall mortality levels. In the UK, which has a reasonably high death rate, COVID raised overall mortality (per million) to around the level it was in the year 2000. Nobody was worried about that mortality level at the time, it was normal. Nor has anyone really noticed or commented on the general improvements in mortality since then. In Sweden age-adjusted mortality went back all the way to 2012 levels, and that with quite minor restrictions. This is suggestive that we perceive the impact as large because it tends to be phrased in terms of deviation from a 5-year model baseline, and because of the general expectations created by enormous 'expert' predictions. Having sacrificed so much via such extreme measures, people need to view it as an extreme event to justify a worldview of 'experts are generally honest and correct' (which can be seen in this article as a very, very strong prevailing world view at the NYT!)