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Notes -
If the age distribution of Hong Kong flu behaved like COVID, then this alone would drop mortality rate by ~60%. Algeria is about 10 years younger than the US, for example. Combined, the effect would be that COVID is about 2.5 times as deadly as Hong Kong flu. The response from authorities was at least several orders of magnitude more severe.
Well, 2.5 times worse is still not exactly "about as bad as COVID".
In any case, no matter what you think about COVID, in my opinion the right-wing reaction to it was bad politics. I can't blame right-wing politicians much for it because in this case it was really more of a grassroots thing from the right-wing base.
Old people vote more than any other age cohort. Old people are also the ones most in danger from COVID. And as someone else pointed out, old people tend to associate vaccines with good things.
No, but if your response to something as bad as X is nothing, then your response to something as bad as 2.5X should be somewhere between nothing and slightly more than nothing, not to go metaphorically nuclear.
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