“Well that is what the experts say” is what their source is.
It’s disgusting how this whole thing is nothing but raw appeals to authority the entire way down. Thinking for yourself, expressing doubt or skepticism or having hope and optimism gets met with scorn, shame and ridicule.
I think there's a simple difference in scale between this other events, that makes it hard to assimilate - COVID was, statistically, the most deadly single natural disaster to happen to my country (the UK) in a century. That's hard to relate to, hard to make policy about, hard to put in perspective. Bear in mind the last pandemic (Spanish Flu) was before antibiotics, before oxygen, before all of the techniques that made COVID something you can treat to some degree of success in a hospital.
Technically true because of the "natural disaster" qualifier, but the world wars killed 890k and 450k Brits.
And smoking killed 750k in the last decade. And now that's been overtaken by obesity.
COVID won't even come close to touching that.
Manmade disasters have fearful consequences too. Perhaps that makes it easier to "relate to."
Now, I don't think casualty figures alone provoke the kind of reassessment and realignment that made WW2 such a watershed, but honestly, I think they probably should.
And it changed over time. You remember hearing news media 3% at the beginning of the pandemic?
When did you hear them update it to <1%? Nope by that point they had moved to raw case counts, which by then then the higher statistic.
Selective reporting all day long.