I am not comparing/confusing C19 and influenza. I'm comparing peoples' reactions...
That being said, 60+K people died of the flu last flu season (in the USA), but people weren't hording TP and raiding supermarket shelves. Will the C19 death toll surpass the flu? Maybe . Is the shopping frenzy necessary?
60,000 sounds a lot, in the USA alone. At least I am surprised by this figure.
Just doing some casual googling brings me to this, and yeah, in the 2018-19 flu season, 34,000 people died from it in America.
Yet I have also read that the common flu has a mortality rare of 0.1%, compared to CV of 3.4% (this figure could also rise).
The answer is probably somewhere in-between these two suggestions of points (that the flu also kills people so we shouldn't treat CV much differently vs. CV is a completely different beast and quantity of life is more important than quality).
Take a look a this brief article of statistics and graph:
https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/life-expectancy-death/deaths-in-australia/contents/age-at-death
Again from rather random googling, it tallies the total deaths of Australians in 2017. Why is this at all relevant? Well, perhaps it isn't greatly relevant, or perhaps it is, but it probably isn't completely irrelevant. For it makes the point that huge numbers of humans die all the time (well, we have a population of over 7 billion), and especially so, huge numbers of the elderly. Nothing at all to do with pandemics. The older that you get, the less likely that you are to wake up the next morning.
In 2017 roughly 160,000 people died in Australia (our population is not even 10% of the USA), and with 66% of those deaths being people over 75; that's roughly 105,000.
Think about the way that the media influences us: "Today 50 people died from the corona virus." Mass panic and determination to do everything possible to live for as long as possible, regardless of quality of life (yes, generally things such as concerts and sporting events to add to quality, for participants and fans). Imagine if they announced, "this year alone, we lost more than onehundred thousand of our loved ones; we must do something to reduce this!"
This means that in Australia, roughly 290 people over the age of 75, die every day. That's a LOT. But it is not as dramatic as that sounds. It is simply due to the large population that we have (both in Australia and more so in the wider world). But you can see how statistics can be used to scare people. 252 people (I assume mostly elderly) died in a single day in Lombardy recently, directly from CV. Okay, so we can already see that this is far more serious than just dying coincidentally from old age (this is a much smaller region than Australia, though does have a population of 10 million), and more serious than the common flu. But the thought process of most humans that are hit with such news, are probably still overrating the severity. Because there were probably really bad 'common' flu days in other recent seasons, where 50-100 people in a region or country died. But because that isn't as serious, and because they weren't killed by something with a fancy name, everyone continued to live on, 100% as normal, which is hypocritical to living 80% abnormally today; both sides can be seen as hypocritical.
Because where do you draw the line? Although there are vaccines for common flues, are they 100% effective? No, and just how effective? If mass gatherings are virtually guaranteed to spread anything from the common flu to CV, and if we do mainly care about quantity of life over quality of life, then shouldn't there be no sporting events or concerts during every flu (Winter) season?
We also don't know how often another CV type of virus will be born. It could become a rather regular thing. We are all going to die, and unfortunately the elderly are all going to die sooner (CV or not). In the end much of the question will be; quantity of life of the elderly vs. quality of life of the young/er.
A two month lockdown of 'living' gives the edge to the elderly, and the more that I've thought about this, it gives them a clear edge. This is not the common cold. And two months may well be enough to beat this thing. However, the longer that it drags on for, the more that such a question would become relevant. For if what you do in your life isn't at all important - or of value/meaning, at least to the individual - then what is the point of breathing in the first place?
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