I mean, in the United States, 149,324 deaths is a systemic failure. Another 834 today, and the day isn't over. Do you not think that constitutes a massive crisis?
What was the reporting like and how has it changed?
It's an excellent (sad) example of history repeating itself.
On the other hand, things aren't all that comparable. Consider the distances people travel, the amount of people that use the same space, but also the amount of single-use things we have now that we didn't have (at scale) back then (even simple things like spoons, napkins, cups).
People love to make comparisons, but it's not always as useful or helpful as one might think (even if we went all the way down the rabbit hole and tried to find all the variables between now and then).
Firstly, the medical technologies of 1918 were nothing like what we have today.
For example, even though it would have been no help fighting Spanish Flu, wide spread use of penicillin was still some 20 years, showing just how far behind the medical system of that time really was.
That difference also shows up in things like life expectancy which back then was in the low 50s where as today it is in the 70s.
Finally the two virus are very different.
One factor that made the Spanish Flu virus so deadly was it killed both young and old.
If COVID-19 had the same death profile I suspect we would be seeing those same 750,000 totals.
And this deathcount was for an event that extended for 16 months between 2918 and 1920. We are in the eight month of covid-19 still
1918
Was that a crisis? Based on numbers alone, I’d say yes. But it sure didn’t seem like it.
Give it a couple days.
Also of interest: Germany has almost as many ECMO-equipped hospitals as the US does, despite having 1/4 the population and a tiny fraction of the land area.
This is very different from the narrative the American and British press have been pushing, probably for political reasons - in that narrative Italy was just unlucky, and it was the other countries that didn't learn from them and stop themselves following in Italy's footsteps that failed. That doesn't seem to match reality. As best I can tell, Italy screwed up so badly that they doomed not only themselves, but any hope of containing Covid-19 in Europe and America. Everywhere else seems to have done a reasonably good job of stopping it coming from China, and it was the unexpected, undetected cases from Italy when they claimed to be completely clean that caused the outbreaks.
The current hysteria is not disproportionate.
That is only the case because we shut down so much of the economy & society.