Per Capita U.S. Covid-19 Deaths Now Exceed World War I
The nation crosses two grim thresholds as deaths exceed 400,000
With the U.S. Covid-19 death toll now exceeding 400,000, the pandemic has taken more lives on a per-capita basis than World War I or any year’s worth of infectious-disease outbreaks in a century.
Such comparisons mean nothing to those who’ve lost a loved one to the novel coronavirus. I note them to illustrate the scope of the pandemic, to put it in some context to help illuminate the severity of the ongoing, largely preventable catastrophe.
The daily Covid-19 death rate — now at 3,225 based on the one-week running average — is nearly as high as the combined toll of the two leading annual causes of death, heart disease (1,774 deaths per day) and cancer (1,641).
Covid-19 is already projected to cause a dramatic decline in U.S. life expectancy during 2020, the biggest drop in at least four decades, and researchers say it’s almost sure to fall further in 2021 and even possibly for decades to come, given ongoing…
