The fatalities of covid are insignificant until many people have it and we run out of we run out of hospital beds. That's really the issue. We only have 66,000 hospital beds in Australia and they aren't sat there empty waiting for covid patients, there's not so many free.
The US population is huge on their RIGHTS!, won't be told what to do, and so now the population infection is around 2%. That would translate into 500,000 cases and ~25,000 dead if it were in Australia had we been behaving like them just for the last few months, not an entire year. Over a year of behaving like Americans we could have >75,000 dead. That's not an insignificant amount of people, incomparable to the flu. It's just going to get worse for the US now and being able to control it is going to get harder and harder. The genie is out of the bottle and there's no stuffing it back in.
The reason it's not everywhere here and we don't know dead people is that we are controlling it well, it's not because it's not a threat. Lock downs are to prevent pandemic outbreaks.
Sure we could just let everyone run wild and free and see a quarter million die in the next couple of years. But when you picture that pile of bodies, actually envision it, would you be the person responsible for making that mountain of meat government policy?