People got viruses, but there was no effective collection of data at that time, so comparisons now are quite meaningless.
Well kind of, but we do have the excess death statistics, which are very well known, analysed and understood. My 20 years in the insurance industry taught me just how thoroughly actuarial analysis goes in understanding the patterns and causes of deaths year on year. Over the last year we have seen an additional 98,000 people die who would not have otherwise been expected to.
One could take the somewhat callous view that they were probably all old and would have died anyway in the next few years, but these are all people who nevertheless died before their time due to an extremely nasty disease.
