I'm fairly certain that the "only" 6 digit death rate we've currently had has had a negative impact on the families and friends of the affected.

If you have been left untouched by it, then good for you, but you shouldn't be assuming that that applies to everyone.

The mortality rate in the US is 1.8%. That is 542k dead out of 29.8 million cases.

That's nearly 30 million cases with all the lockdowns, mask rules, etc.

Even with that minor amount of 9% infected, LA hospitals ran out of capacity, morgues overflowed, etc. Try to imagine if we didn't try to limit the spread - by among other things closing schools.

NZs recent outbreak started from a couple of kids in a school of only 13-1500 students, and with lockdowns that dwarf anything the US did they only just managed to control it, getting to something like 100 positive cases because they didn't want to lock down completely.

> At this point we have enough data. The CDC gives an approximate IFR of 0.7% in the US. That would translate to low 7 digits. Also, it's very heavily weighted to the 70+ population.

..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity.

> Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) but probably not life-changing.

And teachers, and looking at how the breakdown of Italian hospitals meant a huge spike in deaths in the 40+ crowd that would have been just fine if they instead had capacity, a ton of dead parents, aunts and uncles to deal with too.

> The CDC gives an approximate IFR of 0.7% in the US

The IFR isn't a static figure. If the actual incidence goes up to the point hospitals are overwhelmed, so does the IFR, by an enormous amount (so does the fatality rate of unrelated conditions, because resource exhaustion hits all conditions for which the same resources are used, not just COVID.)

Do your numbers account for all the indirect consequences? Hospitals overwhelmed means people with some issues refusing to get that exam that would diagnose early cancer / small heart attack / some other underlying condition. Regular checks hugely postponed or cancelled. People with existing mental issues are a story on its own.

From what I recall, I've read some interviews with heads of cancer clinics in Czech republic which is hit pretty hard, and they reported that they don't see many new patients in early stages of cancer anymore, people who come to them are mostly late stage which manifests hard, and they often go straight to palliative care. Is this some peer-reviewed study published in Nature with nice numbers and graphs? Of course not, we'll get to those numbers maybe 10 years after covid is under control, maybe. But its real people dying out there, mostly quietly without much media attention.

Pregnancy is a serious situation with covid, it can lead to many complications, abortion, and in case of serious complications for the mother, doctors at least here in Switzerland either perform abortion / force early delivery depending on age, since mother can't manage to breath on support enough for both of them (my wife is pregnant right now and senior doctor and we both got covid some 2 months ago, so this is something we checked on pretty intensively... luckily so far so good).

There is no win, we all take a heavy mental toll in confinement / job uncertainty or loss. But the risks are real on the other side too and its not so clearly cut for everyone. I don't have a clear answer on this myself.

EDIT: related to original topic - we caught covid from our little son going to kindergarden. In semi/hard lockdown, small kids going to schools is by probably the strongest infection vector. They can't keep the discipline as well as adults can. Heck, most adults can't keep up the discipline 1+ year consistently.

It's pretty incredible how easily hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, each of which is a full human life, becomes a statistic to some people let alone the millions. Don't we teach students in history classes about how easily people allow themselves to justify mass death when it is convenient?