COVID-19 is a severe common cold virus that has killed thousands of the elderly and the infirm. ...However - is it more deadly than a severe influenza virus, like the one that killed 61,000 Americans in 2018?
This plot shows weekly deaths historically and for the current year. If you look at the US plot, in mid-April it was showing 30,800 deaths per week above the mean per week for the previous several years. That is not inconsistent with the 90,000 total deaths to even date attributed to Coronavirus.
90,000 deaths out of 1.5M confirmed cases is a 6% mortality rate. 1.5M confirmed out of 12M tests puts the lie to the notion that there is a large factor of undetected infected individuals.
So it's not just the common cold, or the flu.
But I don't support lockdowns.
Those graphs you post show the average historical, then the actual weekly difference this year with the shaded areas showing the excess over average.
In other words, the weekly deaths this year graphed over the average historical, which by definition is going to be lower, as an average.
Further, the US graph shows one date point, taken in a January, to be fairly close to the level shown for this year.
There was in fact another year with similar high numbers, I wonder what year that was.
The graph is deceptive in highlighting this years' deaths superimposed over the average historical deaths, then highlighting the difference with darker shade, in an effort to show a great difference in death rates, when in fact it shows this year's death rates compared to the historical average, not the highest numbers of the numbers that make up the total raw data.