It's also important, I think, to consider this as time series data. There was a point very early on when the flu actually was more dangerous but it became taboo to say because it was obvious that wouldn't be true for long. However as covid becomes endemic and we get better vaccines/therapeutics/natural immunity, that will be true again. The death and hospitalization rate will settle to a rate comparable to the flu, but we're not there yet.
It’s all about what you’re measuring… Ebola is less dangerous than the Flu in terms of deaths per year, but it’s disingenuous to measure it that way, and that’s what I think is frustrating people in this thread about the comparison to the Flu.
But I am with you - I think this will settle in at some point, and it will be as back to “normal” as we can, with just some people dying of COVID instead of Flu or Pneumonia or whatever would have eventually taken them before.
The vast majority of people don’t want to be super-spreaders. No one thinks they are actually being a super-spreader, but COVID presents as either asymptomatic or as mild allergies for a portion of the population. Which makes it really hard to wrap one’s head around and a wicked problem from a public health standpoint - “It’s not so bad it’s like a mild cold - why should I change my life for that?” or “Wait, you mean my slight cough can end up killing the people I might infect if I go out tonight? But to me it just feels like seasonal allergies. It’s probably not covid”. Ideally the vaccinations will reduce the number of people who die from a mildly symptomatic person going out by some factor of x. Because we can’t have everyone with seasonal allergies shelter in place forever.
It’s impossible to determine how many people will die from the infection that a mildly symptomatic person has if they go to the mall. In aggregate, it’s not zero (otherwise the pandemic would run its course and not be a problem). Sure, even if it’s a 1% chance someone with mild symptoms transmits COVID if they go to a busy shopping mall, that person has a 1% chance of death. But then they may spread it. So maybe it eventually results in .01, 0.1, 1, or 10 people dying per mildly symptomatic person going shopping? There are so many variables it’s nearly impossible to model, and every variable is now a political issue (contagiousness, are deaths really caused by COVID, vaccination rate, masking and distancing). And if the virus mutates and becomes the next more contagious variant in that person, then it could be hundreds of thousands of people.
But at some point, we have to say “OK - can’t test everyone, we have enough vaccinated people to be good, and this is reality - we need to accept a 0.01 “death factor” for this disease when a mildly symptomatic person participates in society. And I do think (or hope) that eventually that factor will line up more closely with the Flu - or ends up better than the flu’s factor (which is non-zero, but it’s a fact of life so we just keep it moving through Flu season).
To be fair, we don’t know if the population of people at the mall would die at the same rate as what COVID is doing overall with the population.
