Putting COVID-19 Deaths In Context: A New Milestone

Part of the problem with COVID-19 is getting your mind around the scale of the numbers involved.

Yes, it's true, car accidents kill more Americans every year. So far. We're probably going to pass that in a couple of weeks (I haven't forecast that one yet).

Yes, it's also true that influenza kills more Americans every year. We're forecast to break that one as well. The thing is with the flu, it's not a single germ — it's a whole family of them. It also produces that death toll over months. The real comparison here will be the number of deaths next winter that are flu-related rather than SARS-CoV-2 related.

I remarked a while back that COVID-19 would overtake 9/11 in deaths. That seems like a long time ago, but it was less than 2 weeks ago that I made that prediction.

As I write this on the evening of April 9th, the total number of U.S. deaths is 16,679. A month ago, on the 9th of March, we'd had 26.

That's more in this one month that ... the entire Afghanistan war, Iraq wars, and fight against ISIS combined. It's actually already more than twice that amount. BTW: that's all conflict related deaths, not just the combat ones.

We're actually closing in the Korean War. We're forecast to pass the Vietnam War as well.

Anyway, I'm not trying to be morbid. I'm trying to come up with a number that puts this month in perspective with some other month. And I think I've finally found it. We've had more deaths in the past month than the U.S. Army (and Air Corps)† had in combat deaths in June 1944 — the month of the D-Day invasion. In fact, we've now passed every single month of World War II, including July 1944 (German counterattacks in Normandy), December 1944 (the Battle of the Bulge), February 1945 (Iwo Jima), and April 1945 (Okinawa).

† I was unable to find month by month death totals for Naval (and Marine) in World War II. They are kept track of by campaign, but every single one of those is already dwarfed by one month of COVID-19.