COVID-19 toll in US surpasses 1918 pandemic deaths

THE US’s COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) deaths have surpassed the toll of the 1918 influenza pandemic, a milestone many experts say was avoidable after the arrival of vaccines.

The US has reported 675,446 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University data — more than the 675,000 that are estimated to have died a century earlier.

The US hits that deadly mark despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed in record time in a display of the extraordinary advances in medical science in the past century. The inoculations have been passed up by some 70 million eligible Americans, many of them encouraged by Republican politicians and conservative media.

“To have so many people who have died with modern medicine is distressing,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Research Institute, who noted there were no ventilators or vaccines in 1918. “The number we are at represents a number that is far worse than it should be in the US.”

The milestone also comes as the fastspreading Delta variant has pushed the US into a dangerous new phase, upending hopes that the pandemic had passed and setting the stage for an uncertain winter.

Of course, the comparisons to the 1918 pandemic are highly imperfect. For starters, the US has about three times as many residents as it had a century ago, meaning the implied death rate is about a third as high.

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