Mortality is not measured deaths divided by population. It’s deaths divided by proven infected cases.
If you spend time reading about Spanish Flu, you’ll find that even 100 years later the numbers are zero confidence. Global death totals number . . . phrased like this . . . 5 - 70 million people. With a range like that, you might as well not have a number at all.
Spanish flu had lockdowns. Many. Varied state to state just like now. But comparisons are difficult. We have locked down restaurants this year. They did not lockdown for Spanish Flu, but the situation was different in 1918. People did not have refrigerators in their homes. That technology had not become mainstream. They cost way too much.
A home cooked meal in a city was a symbol of great wealth in 1918. Restaurants were how people ate. Prices much lower than home cooked. They were essential businesses in 1918.
Lockdowns in 1918 had people completely bored. They emptied magazine stands for reading material, and the magazine stand worker getting paid by the hour had to shut the stand early and lose pay. Unemployment exploded from these lockdowns and self-lockdowns.
So . . . don’t think there is anything horribly worse today than 1918. If you look, you can find photos of 1918 baseball players with masks.
This was not how most baseball teams addressed the flu. While the MLB season was cut a few weeks short in 1918, that was due less to the outbreak and more to World War I, and it started back on schedule in 1919. But MLB went without any formal protocol about how to handle the outbreak, with no serious talk of canceled games or empty stadiums, and baseball went on, even as the illness came for some of its key figures. - https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/03/09/coronavirus-baseball-history