As you grow older and wiser, remember that you said this:

“Their direct experience means nothing to the actual reality.”

This is how the enlightenment ends, in a nutshell. Over-confident denial of reality, supported by misleading statistics and buggy models.

“Since we’re awash in this contemporary ocean of speculation, we forget that things can be known with certainty, and that we need not live in a fearful world of interminable unsupported opinion. But the gulf that separates hard fact from speculation is by now so unfamiliar that most people can’t comprehend it.” — Michael Crichton

I think you will find they were saying that there were more than 6 million deaths from it globally so far and the fact that your personal experience with it wasn’t particularly serious isn’t a meaningful data point.

I’d also argue that a random quote from the author of Jurassic Park isn’t really moving the conversation forward.

> Over-confident denial of reality, supported by misleading statistics

Sounds far far more like the people who think covid is nothing more than a cold.

It's less than that for people with so called asymptomatic infections. The vast majority of people have had covid my now, and it wasn't much worse than a cold or flu.

In a naive population covid is far deadlier than the flu, let alone the common cold. During a Delta wave in NSW, Australia case hospitalisation rate peaked at 14%.

And at least in Australia the vast majority of cases of covid happened after people where vaccinated, so on a personal experience level that's why most didn't have a severe sickness from it.

You actually believe that without question? Most people didn't have a severe reaction to it even before the vaccines. Only very old and very unhealthy people did.

What happens when old sick people fill up hospitals?

Where did that happen? In many countries they got sent out to care homes.

I’m glad that no one close to you died because of this disease. Other people’s experience is very different.

Your anecdotal experience is not reality.

Your argument is an appeal to emotion, not to facts.

6 million dead from a population of over 8 billion, and that took 3 years to happen.

Mortality rate of less than 0.03%.

Average age of death in the UK was 83 and with 2 or more comorbidities.

Completely overhyped.

Compared to well under 50,000 flu deaths in that same period. So it's 100x deadlier than the flu.

They changed the way they're counting deaths at least in the USA.

In the UK they were carrying out over 1000 times the number of covid tests as flu tests. The false positives alone would have been more than the number of flu tests. Try looking at excess mortality compared to previous years for a more accurate picture. It was worse then preceding years, but less than 2003 and age adjusted less then 2008 in the UK.

Excess mortality would point to covid deaths as undercounted, not flu deaths. The best data I can find shows that covid was at least 10x worse than the worst flu season on record in the UK (2008).

How can you say that when we were only testing for one of them?

I must say, COVID showed how many people didn't treat their bodies as their temples.

Many obese people and then you wonder why they can't fight this off. Now, the exception is the less common immune deficient people - that I understand but damn I know people who eat like utter rubbish