“I think people have this idea, and you see this over and over again, that this is basically a cold or this is essentially the flu. And I think for a lot of people, that’s been their personal experience. But when you look at it as a whole, that’s again just not true,” Bernstein said “... And a lot of people have said things like people aren’t dying ‘of’ COVID, they’re dying ‘with’ COVID. And when you look at the number of excess deaths over the last couple of years, that’s just, quite frankly, untrue.”