One example is the ongoing suicide crisis among U.S. The spillover effects of war continue long after formal hostilities end, and include disability and disfigurement, mental trauma, addiction, homelessness and suicide. The chaos and turmoil often fuels further death, as the influenza pandemic did in World War I. The carnage of war doesn't end just because peace is declared. Official military records are one way of assessing a conflict's lethality, but they have limits, which is why Biagetti views them as inadequate for understanding the full breadth of the impact of these historical events. Marine cemetery at the foot of Mount Suribachi in Iwo Jima. "Through the vast majority of human history, people have understood warfare and disease to go hand in hand and to be inextricably linked," says Biagetti, who is the creator and host of the podcast Historiansplaining. The effort to compare the death toll of the pandemic with that of a war strikes historian Sam Biagetti as an especially "modern" exercise. When we do compare death tolls, what exactly are we comparing? "People were so used to mortality because of the war that even the horrible tallies that were coming with the Spanish influenza had lost their capacity to horrify the way that one might expect," he says. Unlike COVID-19, the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19 killed many people who were in their 20s and 30s - yet as Snowden notes, there wasn't much collective mourning for those young adults, despite dying in the prime of life. "But, I don't think we have a right to weigh up lives and say which is more important," Snowden added. "To the watching world, that's not the same as the death of a young soldier in their 20s, let's say, on the front lines in a war," says Yale historian Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Societies tend to valorize those who died for a cause on a battlefield.īut in this pandemic it's the frail elderly - many of them living in nursing homes and assisted living facilities - who have died in vast numbers. The notion that combat deaths carry a unique meaning or value is deeply rooted in human culture. "I try not to make comparisons to an event or group that I know contains within it a great deal of sentiment, feeling and pain," says Markel, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America and the Fears They Have Unleashed. Howard Markel to make it a practice of never drawing parallels between the death toll from war and a pandemic. This type of response, over time, has convinced medical historian Dr. "It is extremely disrespectful to our nation's veterans, who write a blank check with their lives, to defend our Constitution." "This is comparing apples to oranges," wrote NPR listener Kris Petron in December, in response to a story that made use of that comparison. Which raises the question: Are we as a society too quick to reach for these historical comparisons? Should a politically driven world war and a biologically driven pandemic, more than seven decades apart, be put side by side at all? The true emotional and social impact of either event can never be quantified, but many media outlets still mentioned it. It is certainly a morally fraught exercise. reached - and then exceeded - the 405,399 Americans who died in World War II.įor many, attempting to compare the two death tolls - or even take note of their brief conjunction - is misguided or even offensive. 21, 2021 offered another opportunity for historical comparison: That was the day when the COVID death toll in the U.S. (Currently, more than 3,000 Americans are dying from COVID every day.) Many have turned to history, citing Pearl Harbor (2,403 killed) or the 9/11 attacks (at least 2,977 killed), as a way of providing perspective when the number of daily COVID deaths in the U.S. Journalists, commentators and public officials are left searching for new ways to convey the deadliness of this pathogen, and the significance of its mounting fatality rate. But in the aggregate, the national death toll can feel abstract, and its constant repetition in the news can become numbing. The total U.S death toll has now surpassed 441,000.Įach death is unique, a devastating loss that ripples through a family, a network, a community. the virus killed more than 95,458 Americans. January was the deadliest month so far in the U.S. This dark but necessary arithmetic has become all too routine during the COVID-19 outbreak. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via GettyĬounting the dead is one of the first, somber steps in reckoning with an event of enormous tragic scope, be that war, natural disaster or a pandemic. Sick patients were isolated in converted warehouses during the 1918-19 global influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million worldwide.
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