“Over all, in a bit more than two months, the United States lost more Americans to the coronavirus than died over seven decades in the Korean, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.” --New York Times, May 13, 2020
Over the course of seventy years, the armies of four countries have been trying to kill Americans, but have not succeeded in killing as many as a simple virus killed in 68 days. Put another way, the virus has killed Americans 365 times faster than modern warfare.
Even in World War Two, over our six year involvement, we lost 416,800 troops, for an average of 11,600 in a 70 day period. Using the most conservative Coronavirus death statistics, the virus is still five times better at killing Americans than the Axis was.
Our most deadly war by far was the Civil War, which lasted four years, and killed, by the latest estimate, 750,000 Americans on both sides. Dividing this figure by 21, the number of 68 day periods in four years, we get an average of 35,714. Even using the most conservative figure of 80,000 Covid-19 deaths reported as of May 11, 2020, the virus is still almost three times better at killing Americans than we are at killing each other.
So, isn’t there a war or something that comes closer to the deadliness of Covid-19? Actually, there is. In 1941, with no fanfare, the Nazi government of Germany opened a big, new “concentration camp” at Auschwitz. Its purpose: the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and others the Nazis deemed “undesirables”. Over the next four years, at least 1.1 million prisoners died there. During the camp’s operation, there were 21 periods of 68 days. Dividing 1,100,000 by 21, we get the camp’s average death rate for the same length of time that Americans have been dying of Covid-19.
If you do the math, you may be as surprised as I was. In the same time that Covid-19 has killed 80,000 Americans, the Nazis were only able to murder 52,381 people at Auschwitz. That’s right: the virus is 1.5 times deadlier than Auschwitz. The Holocaust of the Americans.
