system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How does the threat and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic compare with the H3N2 flu pandemic of 1968 and the H2N2 flu pandemic of 1956? (Death toll of H3N2: 1,000,000 people worldwide. Death toll of H2N2: 2,000,000 people worldwide)

Edit: I'm not downplaying COVID-19's severity, I think COVID-19 is a greater threat.
gpt
It's hard to say because Covid-19 is still ongoing and we won't know its full impact for years to come.  
  
What we can say is that SARS-CoV 2 is moving *fast*. Not only is it very contagious, it also emerged into a world with global mass traffic and supply chains.  
  
This speed combined with a relatively high rate of people needing hospitalisation (very roughly 20% of infected) means that Covid-19 overwhelms health systems.  

1968, not so much. Far fewer people travelled by plane or between continents. The world's population was roughly half of what it is now, so a lot of places would have seen a lower population density.  
Also, medicine has moved on. In 1956 or 1968, ventilators were primitive pumps used for theatres. No long term sedation/anaesthesia with ventilator support like now, that only came in the 1980s or so. So maybe the death toll would have been a lot lower then with better medicine.  
  
In summary, comparing Covid-19 to other pandemics is sure very interesting from an intellectual standpoint but it doesn't offer much in the way of guidance. It is here *now* and we need to deal with it *now* even though we still don't know all the facts.  
  
Edit: Regarding health care, this is a perverse one: Since health care in 2020 is so much better, this also means that people are getting older. Conditions that weren't treated as well fifty, sixty years ago - COPD say, or cancer, or diabetes - now create a population at high risk. Then, people with those conditions were much more likely to die from that directly before a virus could reach them. So Covid-19 is a pandemic threatening to overwhelm our health care systems also partly because our functioning health care systems allow a subset of the population to survive for long enough to be susceptible to it.