I am leaning towards the lock down skepticism. It's not that I think that Covid is not worse than a flu, it is worse, but there response is unparalleled. We have had a strict lockdown and lots of deaths anyway. The initial predictions about the virus turned out to be way off, it seems to be more infectious and less dangerous than we were initially told

Initially lockdown was to "flatten the curve", stop the hospitals an in particular the ICU beds from getting overwhelmed. That worked, and while it got close to breaking point here in Spain we made it through.

I noticed as new data emerged from Sweden - they hadn't spiralled out of control as many, including myself, predicted. Flatten the curve seemed to be forgotten about, and it turned into a pointless competition of who has the least cases, least excess deaths - pointless because this is far from over.

Or maybe we are past the worst of it already - the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed only 20% of the passengers infected - so maybe covid only affects 20% of the population.

You calling that a strict lockdown? When I go to a park and see tons of people there, half of them not wearing any masks. We aren't even fining people for not wearing them.

Someone here mentioned how Vietnam handled it, they reacted quickly and had steep fines (for their income) and achieved 0 deaths and now it's 80 days since last infection was reported.

There are other countries that handled it really well: Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea, Finland.

Assuming you're talking about USA. The USA is probably an outlier since it essentially had no lockdown, no enforced mask usage, and very weakly enforced business closures. All the states had were half-assed "Stay At Home suggestions" that people pretty much ignored (and still ignore).

I wouldn't look at any state in the USA for evidence of whether lockdown works or not, because it pretty much wasn't done here.

Yes, I talked about USA, but the countries that did actual lockdown, especially early on got benefits of it.

Who had a strict lockdown? Most of the US did not and if they did, it was too short. Source: I'm a Texan.

Here is Spain was one of the strictest.

It appears they revised the estimate: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm

> Can you explain why the estimates on this page are different from previously published and reported estimates for 2017-2018? (For example, total flu-related deaths during 2017-2018 was previously estimated to be 79,000, but the current estimate is 61,000)?

> The estimates on this page have been updated from an earlier report published in December 2018 based on more recently available information. There is a trade-off between timeliness and accuracy of the burden estimates. To provide timely burden estimates to the public, clinicians, and public health decision-makers, we use preliminary data that may lead to over- or under-estimates of the true burden. However, each season’s estimates will be finalized when data on testing practices and deaths for that season are available.

You were talking about 2018-2019 though. The 2017-2018 was an outlier and it is misleading to use it as an example of typical flu.