>>14302783just rough numbers, but suppose 50k people die on average from flu each year (that's being very generous)
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.htmlthen over 2 years you'd have 100k casualties that society is more or less ok with.
within the next week the US will have attributed over 1M deaths to covid
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/so it's impact has been x10 that of the average flu in the same time span. couple that with it's extreme contagiousness and unknown but potentially serious long-term effects on a wide array of systems in the body.
from a risk analysis point of view (risk = likelihood * costs) i personally think that it wasn't overblown. if anything it shows the world as it operates now both cannot withstand an extremely contagious agent, and encourages such an agent to develop. whether such an agent becomes a disease that kills is a different matter.
if an individual wanted to destroy civilization, they'd go into virology.
