If COVID Were a War

Published July 17, 2020.

Update (2022-03-25): I’ve manually updated the graph with the current fatality count from the CDC.

Update (2021-03-07): The COVID Tracking Project stopped collecting data on March 7, 2021, so this chart no longer updates automatically.

Fatalities from COVID-19 continue to rise in the US. I’ve been having a difficult time wrapping my mind around the numbers involved, so, characteristically, I made a graph.

This compares US fatalities from all causes¹ in some notable conflicts with American deaths from COVID-19. It pulls live statistics from the COVID Tracking Project, so I expect it’ll change over time.

Footnotes:

In some wars a majority of deaths were from disease, not combat. A previous draft of this graph included only combat fatalities, but as the COVID death toll has risen I’ve switched to total mortality.

I’ve also included an upper estimate on US deaths from the 1918–1919 Spanish flu to compare COVID to another worldwide respiratory pandemic.