Telling people that the deaths of their loved ones are "meaningless" is not a very convincing argumentative tack.

Let's look at years of life lost, then, shall we?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3

> YLL in heavily affected countries are 2–9 times the average seasonal influenza

And that is after all the societal changes to deal with the disease.

I personally think that YLL of 2-9x the flu after mitigations clearly justified the mitigations.

It's fascinating to me that a multiple of 2-9x the median flu in YLL (after mitigations) in only a few countries "clearly justifies" the quite disruptive mitigations. I look at the same measures (and I'm implicitly estimating that the non-vaccine mitigations were around 50% effective) and conclude that the mitigations [excluding vaccines] were, in retrospect, probably not justified for as long and as impactful as they were on daily routines.

They were (IMO) justified early on when vaccines were not available and when we knew a lot less about the effective treatment regimens.

Imagine a reliable oracle tells you: "The flu season in 2025 will be 10x as bad as the typical flu season." Is that cause to shut down restaurants, bars, close offices, schools, and universities, shutdown borders, etc, etc. for 12 months to make it only 5x as bad? For me, that's cause to make sure I get the flu vaccine that year, wash my hands a little more, not go to work if I'm ill, and pet my dog.

Some jackass tried unsuccessfully to light his shoes on fire and 20 years later we're still taking our shoes off at the airport. I hope we have a more threat-appropriate response over the long-run here.

> I personally think that YLL of 2-9x the flu after mitigations clearly justified the mitigations

To properly debate this claim we need to know (1) the baseline -- how many YLLs are caused by flu?, and (2) how many YLLs were _saved_ by the mitigations. (Would we have had 2x more Covid deaths without them? 10x? 1.1x?)

They disclose a bias: "Those dying from COVID-19 may be an at-risk population whose remaining life expectancy is shorter than the average person’s remaining life expectancy"