does this 1% figure account for global population or a specific population? does it account for all variants or only certain variants? is it CFR or IFR, or are you also counting "potential ramifications" in that figure like people not receiving the correct care for their illness because of Covid, or people who chose not to go see treatment for their illness during this time that otherwise would have?
Its a rough measure because as with all these things its down to the criteria used to define a "covid death" within a certain polity. For example in the UK the statistic was registered as any death within (I think) 4 weeks of positive test, so you essentially could get hit by a bus and be added to the tally!
Basically if you look at the WHO data for number of cases versus mortalities, its around 1% globally, 3% I believe is the most severe estimate based on unrecorded deaths. The point is its way lower than SARS and MERS by any statistical measure. The other thing about Covid is that negative outcomes are highly age-sensitive, deaths of young healthy people with no co-morbidities are exceedingly rare, which is why the drive to vaccinate kids has been criticized in some circles because although the risk of atypical response to vaccination is a tiny percentile, expectations for mortality are similary remote.
Just look at the figures for yourself, WHO, CDC, BMI etc. Some degree of politicization is unavoidable, and obviously we're not all medical experts, but it doesn't take too much expertise to calculate population size, infection case count, and deaths recorded to get a lay sense of the scale of the issue.
As for my issues; its hard to know where to begin. Obviously delays to treatment are going to cost lives, inability to afford treatment due to economic circumstance is going to cost lives. Being pumped full of fear and paranoia by the government/mainstream media is going to cost lives through the multifarious social ills that sort of mental game propogates. Children being denied natural socialization at a crucial point in development is going to extract immense social cost in the long-term.
Governments taking "emergency powers" is also a concern because once assumed they tend never to taken back, allowing subsequent administrations to use them for their own ends. Its interesting how we see far more expenditure on social-control schemes like test and trace, vaccine passports and the like, containment for the infected/refuseniks etc. As opposed to stuff that actually deals with the core health issues like building more hospitals and treatment centres!
Most of all what bothers me is how little things have changed over the last 20 months in terms of policy as our scientific understanding of covid has evolved. Panic was natural when dealing with an unknown pathogen, but now its pretty well understood epidemiologically and medically. We know its spread primarily in aerosolized form, not in droplets so masking is mostly redundant. We know its a small and relatively fragile virus that denatures quickly in UV light and on surfaces meaning that locking people down in their homes doesn't really achieve much. We have a broad range of treatments and protocols to support better recovery rates, so although a moderate to severe case is definitely a thing to be avoided its unlikely to be a death sentence unless you have existing co-morbidities.
Its not the only thing people are dying from. Flu which as been routinely controlled with vaccinations for years still kills millions of vulnerable people every winter. Cancer is still a thing; and delays to diagnoses can make the difference between full recovery and death.
As Curtis Mayfield wrote in Freddie's Dead, "no one's serious, and it makes me furious".
haven’t you heard ? It’s just flu 
