As someone who knew a few people under age 35 who died from Covid, I find this comment offensive.

A war has casualties on both sides?

But really I find this war analogy a bit silly anyway..

That's the thing, some people have one experience and other the opposite.

I kept hearing "everyone knows someone who was affected by Covid", but I for one have none in my family nor have I heard any Covid related losses from any of my colleagues, but obviously there are people who were affected.

On other hand I do know a person who died due to depression caused by the isolation of lock down.

Count yourself lucky. I lost 1 parent, 1 good friend and -his entire family- of 3, several close associates that I counted among my friends , and my wife.

Random events do not have random distributions, and the early strains of the virus were much, much more aggressive. I still suffer from neurological effects of my COVID infection from the very beginning of the spread of the virus.

People with cancer in remission for years of even decades experienced a huge spike in breakthrough tumors. Vascular damage provoked a massive uptick in ischemic events such as stroke or heart attack. The effects of COVID reach far, far beyond “dying of COVID”.

In my ~2mio pop country, by the end of restrictions, we had (iirc) 5 people in the "below 35" age group what died 'with covid' (not necessarily because of it).

For comparison, that's way less than traffic deaths. Even way less than suicide rates in that age group (and we all know how bad the lockdowns were for many peoples' mental health).

We also had a 20yo girl die because of vaccine-induced clots. She got vaccinated, because she had to (couldn't use public transport without either a vaccine or getting tested every 48 hours, and there was no testing location near her to get tested).

Let's not mention all the other promises.

We took out a good year of schooling and socializing for the whole generation of kids, with empty promises of "when we get vaccines, you won't be able to infect grandma".

> In my ~2mio pop country, by the end of restrictions, we had (iirc) 5 people in the "below 35" age group what died 'with covid'

By way of contrast, as of 2023-04-28[1], England had 157 deaths per 100k in the "below 30" age group. Which on a population of 57M[2] gives about 89k deaths.

Your ~2mio pop country did exceedingly well if your numbers are correct - scaled to England, you'd have expected about 3000 deaths.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-reported...

[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

You've misunderstood and misread your source. The data shared is "total deaths" and "mortality rate per 100k", not "total death and mortality rate" per 100k. It's 157 total deaths in the below 30 group, and 4.2 per 100,000 in the 20-29 range.

For what it's worth, you might consider reflecting on this. Your interpretation was off by a factor of 100, and you didn't notice! That suggests you are staggeringly misinformed about one of the most important events in recent history. It's akin to somebody saying that the military was only 0.1% of the US budget, or that foreign aid was 20% of the US budget. The only reasonable conclusion is that the speaker is totally uninformed on the topic.

Count yourself fortunate. Your country probably avoided the much more dangerous first wave that I assume was intentionally spread by China as part of their strategy to reduce the economic impact of the epidemic.

As an unfortunate anecdote that formed this rather bold and controversial opinion , I had the misfortune of being of a plane literally full of wuhan residents flying to the USA (strangely via the Dominican Republic) in December.

I was curious and asked my seat mate what was the big event, and he explained to me that (some organ of government that I didn’t understand) had created an incentive for companies in Wuhan to send people to conferences in the USA that included paid travel and accommodations, and made the companies that participated eligible for some other program that I also did not understand (my new friends English was not great and at the time I was only mildly curious).

At any rate, according to my companion there was social media buzz among the travelers complaining about weird routing of their flights through other countries and long layovers, speculation that it was an example of government cost aversion or something.

I didn’t think much of it at the time.

Within days of landing, I had the worst “flu” of my life with the signature COVID symptoms. A few days later the epidemic started to hit the news in earnest, and people around me started dying. The early versions of COVID were much more aggressive.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

I thought we are in a place where people seem to express some sort of intelligence, and yet, reality always finds a way...

Ignorance. Ignorance always finds a way. Also, HN is rife with political trolls from China, Russia, the USA, and other countries that fund state-sponsored social media programs.

All wars target the young and healthy.