Consider this a shoutout of empathy for all of you desperate for a “happy medium” in response to the coronavirus.

On one side, we keep hearing from what might be called the “deniers,” who still insist this pandemic is barely worse than the flu. Some of them bombard us with charts and graphs of cherry-picked and misleading numbers — for example, failing to acknowledge that they are comparing five weeks of COVID-19 statistics with a full year of flu stats. Others act as if “total deaths” is the only number that counts, completely ignoring the greater prevalence of hospitalizations and the far greater extent of suffering, even agony, that many COVID-19 victims experience — some of whom come far closer to death before recovering than most flu victims do.