Maybe the avg man on the street, including you, didn't know about annual flu deaths, but it's silly to say that the people whose job it is to monitor these things, plan for them, and look for new outlier cases didn't know. They knew almost immediately as the literature on the subject is starting to show and if you cared to read some of the articles people have posted links to or listened to podcasts that have been provided. Just because you (or others) were not aware, does NOT mean that people weren't aware. In particular, people in authority knew and had been alerted very early on, many of them just chose not to act.
The point was society never shut down the economy because of the flu or wear masks like they do in Asia. The point I was making, to ask the shutdown of an economy so early, would naturally create much opposition.
Right now in NYC, 1/4 of the storefronts, shops, eateries, restaurants, etc. in the financial district are shut; 1/3 in Midtown. Politicians were faced with the decision of creating such economic problems or wait and see. That's hard to do early on when the deaths were less than the common flu. It's not unreasonable to want to wait.
It's not like the Democrats had the right idea either from the beginning. Like I said Biden called Trump xenophobic and many Democrats called him a racist for shutting down travel from China. So it took everyone a while to understand the danger. Even now there are arguments about how much things should be shut down, indoor eating, etc. I still believe that long after COovid is a memory, our economic problems caused by it and the shutdown will long be with us. Millions out of work, businesses shut down, inflation causing prices to escalate hurting the poor and lower-income the most. It's long from over.
