The better number to look at is percent increase in deaths. Worst case scenario we're looking at a 3-10% increase for a single year. Obviously not good, but that's amount of increase is not going to change the course of society.
Are you old enough to remember Sept. 11, 2001? That changed a lot after far fewer deaths! Moreover, there's not much US political leadership can do[1] about deaths from Cancer, Heart Disease, etc. COVID 19, on the other hand...
[1] I mean besides something like Medicare for All. But let's ignore that for the moment since it's harder to draw a straight line from those policy decisions to deaths.
It did and it didn't. It started a couple wars and dominated public discourse until Obama was elected. But did it fundamentally change our society? I'd say no. It was a defining event in the lives of a lot of people. There was a temporary change in patriotism and concern about security. But today that effect is pretty much gone and as a society we're essentially the same as we would have been without 9/11.
In 20 years Covid will be the same. For those that lost a loved one or lost their career it will be a defining event. But for society? It won't really matter.
?
>Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.
>The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.
100k or 200 or 300 sounds like a lot of people but when a normal year sees 3 million dead it's barely a blip. Especially since many of those dying were likely to die within a couple of years anyway.
The US has not done worse compared to the rest of the west. Our deaths per capita are in line with France, Italy, Spain, and the UK. Germany is the only outlier.
This sentiment is entirely because of the dislkke of Trump. I don't like him either and think he sucks, but he's not ruining the country. The US will survive him and continue to be the strongest nation in the world.