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Notice that the little COVID bump is bigger than the bumps under any of the three arrows showing the "Severe Flu Waves". It's just that the general level of deaths per capita was higher in the 70s and 80s, not that the flu waves were worse than COVID.
Of course. In those days you could die from anything else before you would die from covid. In fact, it could even be coronavirus-1970 that was worse than Sars-CoV-2. We just didn't notice it because we expected people to die at this level every year.
There are always different ways to look at the same data. With Covid certain level of deaths were inevitable. Everything that was above that we brought upon us ourselves.
Comparison of extra mortality during pandemic period between periods and/or countries can be even more fun.
Pandemic reduced life expectancy by about a half year, maybe up to one year in very unlucky countries. At the same time life expectancy in Sweden currently is roughly 4 or 5 years higher than in the US. Obviously there are some public health and/or cultural issues that make it impossible for the US to catch up with Sweden in short term. Some could even argue that it is more important to preserve freedom and dynamics, maybe even more quality of life instead of longer life.
Even if you accept those arguments, it still means that there are certain policies that impact life expectancy metric worse than covid. If preventing covid was an easy fruit to pick, the US should have prevented it. But it wasn't. Most likely the US robbed people of their agency, their freedoms and caused more harm than it would have done by implementing different policies to catch up Sweden in life expectancy.
Sweden refused to implement harsh and mostly useless policies exactly because their public health leaders were worried about life expectancy. Whereas the US and most other countries just followed the narrative which was wrong.
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