Herd immunity would still mean millions of dead people you'd have to step over.
The countries that thought they could go this route did a hard reverse once reality hit them.
This disease is now the #1 cause of death in America. Nothing like a trifling total; nothing like a drop; nothing like an ignorable fraction. Very, very significant.
Are you going to atoms in the universe next?
So following this logic lets shut down all hospitals and stop treating all illnesses?
There's also some paranoia because this is new, and because of the fear of asymptomatic carriers. That makes people think they're helpless and have no way of protecting themselves. A loss of control is an important factor in creating terror.
That being said, this virus does truly appear worse. Wherever that fear threshold is for people, this virus has crossed it.
And in response to your other recent comment, my entire family has been “consumed” (you idiot) by one disease or another. I am the only one left. Nobody was hysteric when they died. People were apathetic. It’s difficult to sympathize with people’s hysteria when just a month ago they were apathetic in the face of countless lives lost to other preventable diseases even though there were easy prevention methods available. Difficult to sympathize with the hysteric mob when a month ago I watched them stream from the back doors of bars, staggering into their vehicles and driving off - the same drive of stupidity that fuels the hysteria and apparently your comments.
What negates this thinking is hard mathematics ie that all the other things don't kill at a _geometric_ rate. If left unchecked millions of people will die in a short amount of time.
Yes flu also progress similarly but we have vaccines for the flu and we manage it seasonally. Even considering the CFR for covid-19 will drop substantially it is still killing by OOM more people across all age brackets without co-morbidities (not to mention medics) which the flu doesn't do.
Should we be lucky enough for Covid-19 to have the same disease burden as the worst flu season as of late, and not the disease burden it's actually projected to have, several orders of magnitude more people will die than they would from the flu. So no, compared to 7 billion, they are not basically the same.
Your "really good points" hinge on a shaky understanding of statistics at best, or just outright ignoring the available data at worst.
I think hospitals should maintain enough capacity to handle influx. I think that people should wear masks and wash their hands. But none of that changes what I wrote above. And it doesn’t change the fact that many, many people have a fetish for doom. It’s the same with global warming or the second coming of Christ — a kernel of truth or good intention becomes a mass fetish for doom and no reasonable discourse can survive.