Scale matters. 200,000 deaths and counting in 9 months is a different scale than we in the US have seen from other viral infections in the past century.
COVID is also much deadlier than usual seasonal flu. It has already killed far more people in the US than a typical flu season, despite having infected far fewer people.
YMMV depending on the US State you live in. According to State reported fatality rates, for the 4 month period from 3/27 to 7/27 (a typical flu season length according to the CDC) per capita death rates ranged over two orders of magnitude, from 1 Death in 562 for New Jersey to 1 Death in 54457 in Hawaii.
Considering one death in 5000 to be the definition of a bad flu season, again according to the CDC website for the 17-18 US flu season, you can partition the 50 States into five categories:
1. OMG, IT’S the PLAGUE! (1 in 400 to 1 in 1000): New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
2. That was WAY worse than a flu. (1 in 1000 to 1 in 2500): Louisiana, Rhode Island, Mississippi, Arizona, Michigan (mostly Detroit), Illinois, Maryland, Pennsylvania (mostly NJ-adjacent counties and Philadelphia), Indiana.
3. That was the worst flu in a long time. (1 in 2500 to 1 in 5000): Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Nevada, Iowa, New Mexico (mostly Navajo-adjacent counties), California (Southern more than Northern), Ohio, Virginia, Minnesota (mostly Twin Cities), Colorado, New Hampshire.
4. That definitely was a flu. (1 in 5000 to 1 in 10000): Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri (mostly St Louis), North Carolina, Washington State, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Kansas, North Dakota.
5. What’s everybody bothered about? (less than 1 in 10000): Idaho, West Virginia, Montana, Utah, Oregon, Maine, Vermont, Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii.
When I say “mostly in a region”, the fatality per capita rates are > 3 times the rate in the rest of the State, sometimes 10 times higher as in Michigan and New Mexico.
Over the last couple months, Louisiana and Rhode Island has joined the plague category and the Southern tier has moved up a notch, but it also has been over four months.
Check the numbers for yourself. There was and is a peculiar avoidance in the media of reporting per capita deaths rates. Government sites are much better about providing usefully formatted data.
“Fun” fact: as late as early May, over 50% of the US fatalities were just in the Boston to DC corridor.
I feel like this ignores that the death rate is the result of three things interacting: the deadliness of the disease, the density of the population, and the preventative measures taken.
1. The places that are the least hit are the least urbanized. I would guess that the regular flu also hits them less.
2. These number are including a massive shutdown, and preventative measures, that don't usually occur during the flu season.
3. I'm not sure your numbers are accurate. For example, I just spot checked texas, which has 15,421 deaths: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/texas-coronaviru... That is a rate of 1 in 1880, which would put them in the "WAY worse than the flue" category, not "That was definitely a flu".
Historically, influenza/pneumonia is a little under 10% of all deaths in Hawaii.
The CDC and the Hawaii state department of health combine the causes. "Studies have suggested that P&I [pneumonia and influenza] is a good indicator of influenza-related deaths and therefore P&I is one method for influenza surveillance." This combination makes it difficult to determine how many deaths were due to the "flu" specifically.
