That's a very fair point, and I admit my analogy is very imperfect. In some ways we're actually saying something similar (and you say it very well), but my phrasing may have failed to convey that. A year of influenza deaths is hard to compare in its magnitude to a month of COVID-19, which in turn is hard to compare to the immensity of a single day on 9/11. My thinking is just that as intensity of a threat increases and the time scale over which it manifests itself shortens, the intersection of those two factors is a large part of how seriously and immediately the threat should be viewed.