Was thinking about that idiot co-worker last month that said, “it’s the flu”. One of the things I said in my incendiary response was, “I have never known anyone that died from the flu”. Note that I cannot give exact numbers on COVID. We stopped counting in late December when my unvaxxed F-I-L nearly died from it. The small community he lives in is still reeling from, and simultaneously ignoring, the slaughter.
FLU: zero (my great-great grandmother and one of her children did die from one of the early waves of the “Spanish” influenza outbreak.)
COVID: stopped counting at 40. But at least 20 more died since January. Those later deaths were all from a rural MAGAt-hole in PA.
The numbers I include here are people that myself or my spouse knew personally. We weirdly even had some cross-overs between work associate deaths. Didn’t even know we had worked with/adjacent to the same people until I mentioned a death and it turned out he’d worked with her previously. And only a teeny amount of these folks died prior to vaccine availability. So when I see that the vaccine could have prevented 250,000 deaths, I think that’s a lowball #.
That's a heavy load of loss for you. I'm so sorry.
No one I know died from influenza or Covid or was hospitalized from either - and I'm up there in age. I live in very blue Minneapolis, where mask and shut-down compliance was high, as is the vaccination rate.
A nephew lives in a MAGAt suburb- his neighbors dropped like flies from April 2020 through Delta in winter 2021. Our next door neighbor is a paramedic in a different MAGAt area. He considers Covid19 a Darwinian thinning of the GOP herd.