This is factually untrue. There have been 100,000 COVID deaths since May 1st, while the worst Flu season in the last decade fluctuate between 30k and 60k for the entire year.
But thank you for proving my point.
Sounds like our response to this should be this should be to really,
REALLY, nag people then, but not much more, based on our response to the flu since...well...forever.
But seriously, in March and April, the thought process was that if there was an outbreak anywhere, the hospital systems would be overrun, we would quickly run out of the most critical of assets in our ventilators, and bodies would pile up in the streets. Once July rolled around, Arizona, Florida, and Texas all had the "surges," that the media highly covered. No talk of ventilators. Why? Because we learned that the ventilators actually probably did more harm than good. The USS Comfort was never deployed, even though it was free after treating a whopping five patients in NYC.
Now, all three states "surges" are over with much less carnage than what happened in the Northeast. No one ever created overflow hospitals in Arizona, Florida, and Texas. Other than a few small outlier hospitals, for a short period of time, there was never even a concern about hospital capacity. People in the states, dined out, played sports, had camps, went to work, etc. Had there not been wall to wall coverage of COVID, you'd have not know there was even an outbreak as most areas in Texas (that have easy to track data) saw no change in hospital capacity from June to August.