Old people still have a right to a free and healthy life.
When I lost my sister-in-law due to an unknown brain tumor at 28, it was a catastrophic event from which her entirely family has never recovered.
To say that these deaths are equivalent doesn’t seem right to me, even though I agree we should do everything we can to preserve healthy lifespan for everyone, young and old.
When I lost my grandmother in her late 70s the day we were visiting for her birthday, to a sudden heart-attack, all my family could feel was the hollowness left behind by her absence, and thoughts of all the life events she would miss, things unsaid and so on.
A new disease with unpredictable long-term effects, that kills at least twice as many people as the flu despite unprecedented preventive measures is bound to cause more alarm.
Remember that regions hit early and unprepared were carting dead people by the truck load, most notably in Northern Italy. If we didn't have lockdowns and other measures, that would have continued and escalated all over the world - we would have probably easily had 10 million or more dead just this year if we had treated this just like a flu.
Over what timeframe? Novel viruses come but once per century, flu kills consistently year after year after year, always mutating to escape eradication... and the flu deaths pile up to astronomical heights over the decades
Only a relatively small percentage of Americans have gotten infected with SARS-CoV-2 yet. Without vaccination, in the space of a few years at most, CoVID-19 will kill as many people as flu does in many decades.
Masks are something we will hopefully have learned to wear forever during the cold season, as they will have a measurable impact on deaths not just from seasonal Covid, but from seasonal flu as well. I believe that the majority of the population will internalize this simple hygienic practice from now on, which would be one silver lining for this pandemic. People in East Asia have learned this habit some time ago, and it has served them well.
I disagree. I just think the humans most severely vulnerable to the flu died off during the first few waves. Consider small pox. It was a novel virus for the Native Americans, who had no "natural herd immunity" and they got eviscerated by small pox. Colonists, despite not having vaccines, and despite still being able to get small pox, were not eviscerated since the virus wasn't able to spread and/or kill as well due to their natural immune systems.
What do you call this if not "natural herd immunity"? If you kill off all the weak and vulnerable, leaving only survivors and survivors' offspring who are virus-resistant... then you now have "natural herd immunity".
What you're describing is simply a disease running its course and killing everyone who is not naturally immune/resistant or not strong enough to survive despite being sick. There is no herd immunity aspect. At best you could call it natural selection.
During the worst of the HIV epidemic, we saw people in their 30s dying left and right. Malaria kills mostly young children.
All lives are valuable and worth fighting for, but it does seem that these losses are fundamentally worse than COVID. If we would count healthy years of life lost, rather than raw number of deaths, I think that would be more apparent.