Maybe, but I'm willing to bet it's a very small number compared to how many could die if the electrical power grid went down or land line telephones or the water system. We didn't give up privacy and freedoms to protect those systems, why would we give them up for the internet?

Actually, that's precisely the issue. If the entire internet goes down, it will start to impact things like the power grid and the water systems. Every year, utility companies put more and more of their infrastructure behind increasingly clever management infrastructure, and control it over the open internet. Hopefully none of it will fail-unsafe (though I bet something will), but if the management systems are offline for weeks?

And it will immediately, although not fatally, impact land line telephones, which I believe do significant backhaul over IP.

I'd imagine that taking a laptop to the control server and plugging in an ethernet cable would suffice to access the control panels if the internet is down.

Okay, I give up. Why is sacrificing privacy and freedoms a necessary condition of protecting the electrical power grid, land line telephones, or the water system?

I don't think it is. Just like I don't think it's required to give it up to protect the internet.