And those deaths are with stay at home orders, social distancing and other precautions that we don't normally take with the flu.

Nah, this virus has a two week lag. We hit that peak in NYC because they were unprepared and blindsided. It doesn't help that the federal government was slow to act but big population potential epicenters like New York should've acted regardless of what our federal government was doing.

Take a look at Los Angeles and San Francisco - do you hear about what's going on there? No, because their government, both the city and state, reacted quickly enough to clamp down on everything even when they were at near-zero cases.

Whereas you had the bumblefuck Governor for NY and the NYC Mayor waiting for marching orders from the federal government, when it was blatantly clear what happens when you sit around and scratch your okole all day reacting instead of being proactive.

We hit 59k because we weren't prepared. A huge state like Cali managed to clamp it down - Cali could've turned into the next New York but they were swift. Look at the top four hardest hit states - Masschussetts, Michigan, New York, and New Jersey.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html

That adds up to 34k people. 59k - 34k = 25k everywhere else.

So yeah, if we're arguing numbers, it is technically less than the flu but only because 36k people die from the flu a year - we stretch this thing out to the entire year and guaranteed we're gonna hit numbers well above the flu, which is extremely scary.