tl;dr - COVID and Influenza may have similarities, but the comparison is premature, faulty, and doesn't reflect the actual threat of COVID as we understand it currently. At this point I'm no longer asking people to change their behavior, it's pointless. However, the very least you can do is not be dismissive of people who are still being cautious.

Comments about "show your papers" are bullshit. We had an opportunity to prevent this from becoming a pandemic, and once it became a pandemic we could've worked together to limit spread and protect one another. Instead we had a large chunk of society that decided letting COVID burn through millions of victims was preferable to wearing a mask or not having parties.

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CDC says the 2018-2019 Flu season killed about 28K people, hospitalized 375K people. The vast majority of those were in the 65+ age group. (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html) The 2017-2018 season estimate was 61K, the 2019-2020 estimate was 22K, prior years from 2010 through 2017 were as high as 51,000 and as low as 12,000.

The U.S. is averaging 400-500 deaths from COVID per day. If you split the difference and call it 450, that's more than 160,000 per year. Note that COVID numbers are probably shaky given that we have states like Florida trying to block reporting, and inaccuracies in reporting since COVID deaths may be misreported (e.g. someone recently "recovered" from COVID dies of stroke or heart attack that may be linked to COVID but the person isn't tested for COVID or isn't currently testing positive but the death is likely a result of COVID).

So, our averages are far higher than Flu and that doesn't even take into account deaths we aren't counting as COVID. The excess deaths reported from March 2020 - March 2022 were 15% higher than reported COVID deaths.

We also have no evidence of "long-flu" the way we're seeing complications of COVID infections long past the initial sickness.

And we don't yet know if we've reached a plateau or if we have more mutations/waves in front of us that will spike numbers. Or, maybe we are seeing the tail end and we'll stay at current numbers or decline further.

Several experts are predicting a fall surge - which may or may not happen, and may or may not be severe. Like Flu, yes, many people now have some exposure and/or have been vaccinated -- so COVID is less "novel" and may keep declining in severity, but given lax attitudes towards masking and vaccinations/boosters and other precautions, we'll see more sickness and death than we need to.

Anecdotally: Between March 2020 and March 2022 I knew maybe two people in my immediate circle of friends and family (about 30 people) who tested positive for COVID, and two who likely had COVID but didn't get a positive test. The two likely cases were prior to vaccine availability and one of the couple works in health care and had no real way to isolate and avoid exposures. Happily, none of them died or were hospitalized.

Since March of this year my immediate family (4 people) and my wife's brother & his wife (who's pregnant and being super-cautious) are the only people I know who haven't tested positive for COVID at least once. Most of my co-workers have had it. While, again, no one has required hospitalization or has died, the reported symptoms & after-effects often are higher in severity with a case of the flu. We're talking weeks long "brain fog" and loss of smell/taste, shortness of breath, and so forth in several cases. (To be fair, some cases have been mild - usually spouse or children of someone who's been sicker, but tested positive after exposure.)