well - should we compare this to a bad flu season or to 1918? that's a reasonable question. what does the data actually say?
2-3x 80,000 is 160,000-240,000. and, if you speciously boost that 80,000 over the winter to 100,000 for the year, you're left with 200,000-300,000 - at a factor of 2-3. that's about right.
on the other hand, it's estimated (they didn't have as good record-keeping back then) that roughly 300,000 people died in 1917-1918, in a population that was much smaller. google suggests that there were a little more than 100 million people in the united states in 1917; using a factor of 10/3, that would scale up to a million deaths - 5x what we've seen at this point.
so,
- a bad flu year - 80,000-100,000
- covid-19 - 200,000-300,000
- spanish flu - 1,000,000+
it seems like we should be comparing it to a very bad flu year and not to 1918, clearly.
you'd sell less papers (or generate less clicks) that way, though.