Since the fatalities skew heavily toward the elderly, in practice this means if everyone catches Covid, most people are unlikely to have a close personal friend or relative who dies as a result of the disease. Sounds not too bad, right?

A fatality rate of 0.3% also means that if everyone in the United States catches it, a million people will die. We're coming up on the equivalent of a 9/11 every day (though again, skewing heavily toward the elderly). You can't rely on personal experience to put these kinds of numbers into perspective.

> A fatality rate of 0.3% also means that if everyone in the United States catches it, a million people will die

Exactly.

The first sounds completely acceptable. The second sounds unacceptable. They are exactly the same number, just worded differently for effect.

If you go with "Dunbar's Number" of 150 people that a single person can meaningfully maintain a social relationship with, that means if everyone in the US caught coronavirus, statistically you would have a 50% chance of knowing someone that died of it. Those seem like perfectly acceptable odds.

I think that cuts to the core of it. It's a tragic situation, but it is unclear whether it is catastrophic. That means we should be unsurprised that society is pretty evenly split over whether the measures we've taken have been too much or too little.