> How exactly do you know that your interpretation is more accurate than someone elses?

I don't. However, given the severity of the outcome of contracting COVID, would you rather play it safe, or be secure in your interpretation (which is less severe than mine)?

> ... disproportionately killed young people. I know this sounds callous, but a virus that spares the lives of people with more years ahead of them seems preferable over one that kills people in their prime.

Younger people are also dropping dead from COVID, and being scarred for life by it, far more than the original numbers in March and April indicated. You don't need to just be worried about your grandparents, you need to be worried about yourself just as much.

Being elderly, and all the comorbidities that are associated with older people, just increase an already significant chance of unfavorable outcome.

> I really would like to understand what your measure is that brought you to your conclusion that COVID-19 is "worse than the Spanish Flu" because, from most measures I can tell, it's not as bad.

Lets try this another way. Do you know why the US military switched from 7.62 to 5.56? If you kill a soldier, hes dead, the body will be dealt with after the battle. If you wound a soldier, now another, healthy, soldier is trying to pull him out of the fray to save his life.

Spanish Flu is that 7.62, SARS is that 5.56. We are now going to have to spend significantly more resources than we would have otherwise to deal with the outcome of SARS, and it would be barbaric of us not to.

People will be suffering from heart, lung, even brain damage for the rest of their lives. This is happening during a time that, pre-COVID, the healthcare system in many countries, the US included, was coming off the rails.

SARS couldn't have come at a worse time. We don't have the medical system to deal with what we have now, how are we going to possibly deal with this new thing?

We couldn't even get proper insurance reform to go through with Obamacare without a full-scale partisan war happening in Congress. We're going to have to have something at least that big to tackle the eventual outcome of this.

If COVID would have killed people like the Spanish Flu did, then the worst we'd have to work with is the number of people missing from society, the brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers that aren't here anymore. But, this? We have to worry about something we don't understand and can't easily predict, something that could get much worse, and is getting worse.

We have to worry about something that may never go away. What if this becomes a SARS season, every year, like the Flu season? They are working on a vaccine, but it isn't here yet, and from the papers I have read, they have indicated that this may be very difficult given some people do not have useful immune responses, and we don't have an accurate idea of what percentage of the population has this issue; relying on herd immunity to save us doesn't seem to be working.

Any reasonable person should be absolutely terrified. However, what I see is a lot of unreasonable people that are not taking this as what may be the worst threat to society in our lifetimes, something that can only be compared to things we read about in history books.