> A bad year for influenza is about
Maybe about tenth your figure, once you exclude non-flu pneumonia-- which is about where we are now for covid19. Flu death figures are Flu+Pneumonia because they usually don't check. Efforts to separate flu from flu + pneumonia all result in flu being a small fraction of the total ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ ).
The point still holds to compare Covid vs flu+pneumonia then. This is some weird No True Scotsman argument you're making where it's not the "True Flu" if they had pneumonia as well... (likely getting pneumonia because of the flu) I doubt the dead people would be comforted by such a subtle distinction.
The plus operator here is "and/or" not "and", but I presume you must have understood this. The GP's point is that flu+pnumonia = (flu) U (non-flu pneumonia). Nobody is denying that flu with pneumonia is flu.
What's really happening is that some people are trying to compare deaths from Covid-19 to deaths from the typical flu/pneumonia season. Nitpicking about what is or isn't the flu really doesn't matter, what matters (to me at least) is how many more deaths Covid-19 is causing than normal "flu/common cold/pneumonia/whatever" deaths which happen every year.
The CDC's figure is "flu or pneumonia" (non-exclusive). The majority of the moralities included in it do not have influenza.
Fully aware of the types that will come out of the woodwork for simply saying this, however: no, it's currently still not on track for even a mild flu year yet alone a bad one.
A bad year for influenza is about 650,000 deaths worldwide, pneumonia deaths are often an aftereffect of the flu and it kills 2.5 million on average each year.
SARS-COV-2 has killed 60,000 in 5 months despite having no vaccine or known medicinal treatment, mainly due to locally overstretched medical resources more than anything else.
It's not even close to being equivalent to a bad flu year yet, and that's ignoring the secondary deaths.