(Take this as coming from someone who pays attention for some time, but is not really knowledgeable about medicine.) People are today a lot healthier than they were 50 years ago. This alone helps a lot. Additionally we have better disinfectants and better procedures and better non antibiotic drugs. So the other parts of our defense in depth are largely intact.<p>Additionally I read some time ago that the problem is not the difficulty of developing new antibiotics, but the collapse of antibiotics research in the 80ies. So once the field is back up, there should be new antibiotics.<p>So as far as I understand it, the lack of antibiotics is a big problem, but a big problem on the scale of thousands are gonna die, not millions are gonna die.