![]() ![]() Jennifer Nuzzo, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security: I mean, first of all, we have to acknowledge that it's a complete and utter tragedy, because the vast majority of the deaths have been preventable, because many of them have occurred, in fact, most of them have occurred since the development of the COVID-19 vaccines.īut what we're really seeing is the effect of the United States not making enough progress in vaccinating adults against the virus. What accounts for this high death rate, the U.S., as compared to its peer nations?ĭr. We dig into that now with Jennifer Nuzzo, who studies epidemiology and global health at the Johns Hopkins Center For Health. rate was higher than Britain, Germany, Canada, and Japan, just to name a few.Īnd the disparity has been even worse during the spread of Omicron. And, as you can see on this simplified chart of The Times' data, the U.S. death rate for COVID to other wealthy industrialized countries. “We need to stop thinking back to 1918 as a guide for how to act in the present and to start thinking forward from 2021 as a guide to how to act in the future.Judy, those troubling statistics have been persistent since COVID first spread.Īnd, today, an analysis by The New York Times underscores just how deep these problems are. “The truth is we have no historical precedent for the moment we’re in now,” writes Howard Markel, the director of the Center for History of Medicine at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, last month in the Atlantic. Chan School of Public Health suggests that another reason for high rates of Covid-19 infection is from the misinformation that spread through the internet, per CNN. We have no idea - I don’t, and I don’t trust anybody who says they do - where this Covid-19 will go.”Įpidemiologist Stephen Kissler from the Harvard T. “In 1918, the pandemic became not so deadly within two years. ![]() “Remember, we’re still counting,” Morens tells STAT News. Currently, millions of Americans have still not been vaccinated, per CNN. However, Covid-19 cases are still rising despite the availability of vaccines, and other modern medicine practices. To control infections a century ago, non-pharmaceutical interventions-like isolation, quarantine, use of disinfectants, cloth masks and limits of public gatherings-were enforced, according to the CDC. Medicine was also not as advanced during 1918, and a vaccine against influenza was not available, according to CNN. When looking at the national population-level data during the two events, the 1918 influenza still tops Covid-19, per Stat News. Globally, Covid-19 has taken the lives of 4.7 million people, whereas the 1918 pandemic killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million people. So, while the 1918 flu killed one in every 150 Americans, Covid-19 has killed one in 500 people so far, per CNBC. Now, there are 303 million people living in the country. In 1918, the population was less than a third of today's at 103 million people living in U.S. When looking at two separate pandemics that occurred in different time periods, understanding the context of all technological, medical, cultural, and social advances that occurred over the past century is important, reports CNBC.Īmerican population numbers were vastly different. Mortality rate was high in healthy people between 20 and 40 years old, making this a unique and devastating feature of the influenza virus, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the U.S., it was first identified in military personnel in the spring of 1918 and mostly affected children less than five years old, adults between 20 to 40 years old, and seniors 65 years of age or older. The 1918 flu, also known as the Spanish flu, spread worldwide during 19. “It’s generally known around the world that America didn’t do a very good job in the early stages of controlling the pandemic,” says David Morens, a medical historian at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to Helen Branswell for STAT News. Experts suspect the recent surge is due in part to the persistence of the deadlier Delta variant, reports CNBC’s Berkeley Lovelace Jr. Currently, an average of 1,900 deaths are reported per day in the U.S. Many health experts suspect that the Covid-19 pandemic’s high death tolls are a result of America’s insufficient response to control the pandemic early on-despite modern day scientific and medical advances-and consider the phenomenon a tragedy, reports Carla K. The coronavirus pandemic has become the deadliest disease outbreak in recent American history with tolls surpassing the estimated deaths of the 1918 flu. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, 681,253 individuals in the United States have died from Covid-19 infections, while over a century ago, the country lost an estimated 675,000 people during the 1918 influenza pandemic, reports Holly Yan for CNN. ![]()
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