The thing is, we DID see a high mortality rate. We DID have incinerators running up queues in Italy and mass graves being dug in New York. Those things happened. Millions of people died from COVID, either directly or (more likely) from opportunistic infections enabled by COVID.

However the mortality rate normalized as the total number of infections rose. It mostly killed off people in groups that were high risk. That's almost tautological - the people in those groups may not even have known they were high risk prior to COVID though.

In other words: if the purpose of the response to COVID was to prevent deaths, we largely failed. If the purpose of the response was to contain CoV-2, we definitely failed. In retrospect, the function if not the purpose of the response was to delay the spread and enable immunization from vaccines. I wouldn't call it a success, especially not globally due to the hesitance to waive patent restrictions for poorer countries, but it was less of a failure than the other two possible purposes of the response.

Of course the problem is that while the rightwing meme of "is it FROM COVID or WITH COVID" is already difficult enough to deal with, measuring the impact of COVID on patients who did not die is even more difficult because we not only can't fully know what variables we're looking for but those variables are also likely to be extremely difficult to isolate, especially given the stress of being in a pandemic, news coverage about the pandemic and the measures enacted as a response to the pandemic.

It is possible for both dying "from" and dying "with" to be true. (although the medical meaning of each is imprecise IHMO)

I have read that many (most?) of the victims of the 1918 flu pandemic did not die from the virus, rather the virus weakened them to the point where pneumonia bacteria took hold in their lungs. With no recourse to antibiotics many did not survive the bacterial infection.

This sounds like how my great-grandfather died. It was reported that he contracted the flu and was sick for two weeks but began to recover, then relapsed and died. Sounds like a bacterial secondary infection after a viral infection.

> Of course the problem is that while the rightwing meme of "is it FROM COVID or WITH COVID" is already difficult enough to deal with

I don't actually understand why this is considered a meme or rightwing, its always seemed like a reasonable question to me.

As you pointed out, a large majority of those who died were already at high risk, meaning they already had underlying health conditions. If someone with high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, etc contracts a novel virus and dies is it really as simple as saying the virus is what killed them?

I don't think people often articulate the question well, that's for sure. Its usually used as a talking point, but it is a reasonable question in my opinion. Saying that Covid killed someone that has been dealing with health issues for years or decades, and likely is on multiple prescription medications, writes off all of their underlying conditions and boils it down to a statistic that reads as though the person was totally fine until they contracted CoV-2.

I think this is unintuitive to me, because “dying with Covid” makes the assumption that the person was actively dying from a completely separate cause and got Covid before they died… which isn’t necessarily true for folks with underlying health conditions. Like if I had uncontrolled diabetes which made me move slowly due to foot rot, and someone struck and killed me with their car, do they get to argue I actually “died with car accident”?

> I don't actually understand why this is considered a meme or rightwing, its always seemed like a reasonable question to me.

I mean, yeah, that's the school of Just Asking Questions. It's standard bad faith participation strategy in discussions, you play the role of an unconvinced fence sitter while actually pushing a narrative. In this case, it was that COVID was killing fewer people than it actually was.

While for a statistician or a medical practitioner looking to better understand the pandemic will find value in the answer to the question, your average laymen doesn't understand how to apply the difference to arrive at an informed opinion. People parroting this weren't concerned how many people were actually dying of COVID; they wanted to go get their hair cuts and eat out again.

A desire for a return to normal is a very... well, normal and human impulse but if it's not time yet, it's not time yet.