I lost two friends to COVID. That weighs on me a hell of a lot more than the knowledge that I didn't lose others. It's going to influence every discussion on this forever. Because they died.
Yea it does when it's used as a rhetorical blunt object to bash dissent in every conversation when people speak about the egregious & fruitless authoritarianism that capitalized on the exaggerated risks of covid. There is a very specific risk profile and treating everyone who's at very low risk as though they're on the opposite end of the spectrum is simply misinformed.
There are people who are vulnerable to covid, that has always been the case, but they are a very small minority of people. And insofar as pretty much every heavy-handed intervention failed to protect those people, and also inflicted a massive fruitless cost on society (that oddly enough puts the vulnerable at even more risk because of the resulting societal dysfunction and disorder), yea you better believe people should be pushing back on using the dead as a thought-terminating cliche. It's a way to scapegoat the rest of society for not obsessively masking (as though this ever helped adequately, the evidence is still weak and in real-life most people either don't use the right mask or use the mask incorrectly) or taking a vaccine that doesn't even prevent transmission.
You then willingly entered the thread with "I'm sorry about your dad, but let's not exaggerate based on personal anecdotes." Who accuses someone of exaggerating a death?
Stop making this about your anticovid cause... you received a negative reaction because you were being highly insensitive.
The point is to provide a neutral voice in contrast to the fearful one.