Problem is things sound much more alarming if you weren't aware of these things and media reports them all the time.
[1] https://www.itv.com/news/london/update/2014-12-19/ambulances...
If you Google around (and set the time frame to 2001-2019) you find a lot of press articles on overloaded ICU's, temporarily closed wards, patients stops, postponed surgery etc.
In most Western countries the health care system has been increasingly strained. And even a slightly worse flu than normal would inevitably have resulted in severe problems. Even without covid-19.
https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...
And that's only after a very weak 2018/2019 flu seasons - with one of the lowest death spikes on record.
Sweden and many other Western countries also have many more elderly people in 2020 than in 2009:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/sweden/2020/
With there being about 20% more 80-84 year old men (prime death age and gender) in 2020 than in 2009.
Scientific research comparing Norway and Sweden concludes that basically COVID deaths in Sweden are mortality displacement from 2018/2019 and 2021: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...
What's most interesting is why this pandemic has been so heavily politicised and publicised, almost precisely at the timing of the 2020 American election, as the American economy was booming, and with a major aftermath being that many of the world's wealthiest people are now even wealthier due to rampant money printing.
Back to Brazil specifically, the major factor here is obesity, which has increased to 19.5% of the population from just 13.7% a decade ago: https://www.statista.com/statistics/781305/share-adult-peopl...
The correct response to COVID should have been to limit sugar (for obesity), and coal and oil burning (for air pollution).
COVID is basically a once-a-decade flu variant, but our population is now much fatter, sicker, and older this decade.
This is just untrue. Look at the excess mortality rates across various countries: https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...
Without the lockdown (which kept hospitals from overflowing) we would have been looking at similar death rates to those in Ecuador/Bolivia/Peru where 69%/72%/97% more people died than usual last year (vs 19% in the US and 16% in Sweden.)
Only 15-20% of people in the US have been infected, and almost half a million excess deaths so far.
With the lockdown, weekly excess deaths have been double a bad influenza year in the Netherlands, https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/2/20-2999_article
The infection fatality rate for Covid-19 has been estimated at 10x that of seasonal flu. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201030/covid-19-infection-...
