[TomSwirly]

There are over a million dead in the United States for whom your statement is not true.

[wolfram74]

My generous interpretation of OP is that during the covid pandemic our precautions that kinda-sorta slowed down covid were adequate to basically remove influenza from the human population as indicated by being the least amount of influenza activity on record[0]

[0]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm

[mike_hearn]

It's not widely agreed upon that this was due to mitigations, and there's unfortunately no evidence they slowed down COVID either. All claims that mitigations slowed COVID fall apart when examined carefully (often they aren't even real, they're just model predictions being presented as if that was the same thing as empirical evidence).

Rather, there seems to be some mechanism by which some viruses push out others. This can also be seen in how new SARS-CoV-2 variants would often rapidly exterminate the prior variant within weeks, instead of co-existing.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Whatever the number of dead, it wouldn’t be true for them. If we don’t take precaution X then Y more people die, but that doesn’t mean every X is worth it.

[skyyler]

Imagine how many more would have died if no one washed their hands.

[TexanFeller]

Very few. Covid mass infection events happened mostly through the air, much less so through touching a surface. We learned that early in the pandemic. Hand washing after the first few months was mostly kept as hygiene theatre and for preventing transmission of infections other than covid.

[colechristensen]

It is not clear to me that any significant number of deaths were prevented by lockdowns once vaccines were available, only delayed by a maximum of 3 years. Everyone still got covid. Some people didn’t make it through the filter, that’s what new diseases are like.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Given that people are still dying of COVID, "a maximum of 3 years" is incorrect.

[geteegudc]

A million dead people, sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension, don’t matter. It’s a funny piece of human psychology. Deaths years ago or years in the future, or in Africa or wherever. Just don’t matter to most people. Goes double when they are “other”.

[afavour]

“sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension” is where that falls apart, though. One million dead within the US alone means a lot of people were touched by COVID death.

[tshaddox]

Aren’t they not at all far from us, in any dimension whatsoever, except that they are not literally us?