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More than 1,900 people are dying in the US daily on average – the highest level since early March. Covid-19 has now killed as many Americans as the 1918-19 flu pandemic, with more than 675,000 reported deaths. The US population a century ago was just a third of what it is today, meaning the flu cut a much bigger, more lethal swath through the country. But the Covid-19 crisis is by any measure a colossal tragedy in its own right, especially given major advances in scientific knowledge and the failure to take maximum advantage of vaccines. Unlike a century ago, vaccines have been made widely available. However, an extensive reticence to be inoculated, fueled in part by baseless fears about safety and efficacy, means that 36% of people in the US aged 12 and over have yet to be fully vaccinated, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Big pockets of American society – and, worse, their leaders – have thrown this away,” said Dr Howard Markel a medical historian at the University of Michigan.
The White House initially forecast 100,000 to 240,000 deaths from Covid-19, if people socially distanced. Donald Trump, who erroneously predicted the coronavirus would simply vanish, oversaw the lower end of this forecast being reached in May last year, the latter death toll arriving in November. A surge in deaths in the spring of 2020 was surpassed by a larger wave of deaths over winter, with a record 4,197 people dying on a single day, 13 January, according to Johns Hopkins University. Since Joe Biden became president, the rollout of vaccines has helped push the rate of deaths down, although it started climbing again in August due to the spread of the Delta variant. The true death toll may be much higher than the official total because, like the previous pandemic, it is estimated. Also similar to the 1918-19 flu, the coronavirus may never entirely disappear. Scientists hope it will become a mild seasonal bug as human immunity strengthens through vaccination and repeated infection. “We hope it will be like getting a cold, but there’s no guarantee,” said Rustom Antia, a biologist at Emory University, suggesting an optimistic scenario in which this could happen over a few years. For now, the pandemic still has the US and other parts of the world firmly in its jaws. While the Delta variant-fueled surge in infections may have peaked, US deaths are more than 1,900 a day on average – the highest level since early March – and the overall toll topped 675,000 on Monday, according to the count kept by Johns Hopkins.
Winter may bring a new surge, with the University of Washington’s influential model projecting an additional 100,000 or so Covid-19 deaths by 1 January, which would bring the overall US toll to 776,000. The 1918-19 influenza pandemic killed 50 million globally, at a time when the world had a quarter the population it does now. Global deaths from Covid-19 stand at more than 4.6 million. The 1918-19 flu’s US death toll is a rough guess, given incomplete records of the era and the poor scientific understanding of what caused the illness. The 675,000 figure comes from the CDC. Before Covid-19, the 1918-19 flu was universally considered the worst pandemic in history. Whether the current scourge ultimately proves deadlier is unclear. In many ways, the 1918-19 flu – which was wrongly named Spanish flu because it first received widespread news coverage in Spain – was worse. Spread by the mobility of the first world war, it killed young, healthy adults in vast numbers. No vaccine existed and there were no antibiotics to treat secondary infections. Jet travel and mass migrations threaten to increase the toll of the current pandemic. Much of the world is unvaccinated. And the coronavirus has been full of surprises. Just under 64% of the US population has received as least one dose of the vaccine, with state rates ranging from a high of approximately 77% in Vermont and Massachusetts to lows around 46% to 49% in Idaho, Wyoming, West Virginia and Mississippi. Globally, about 43% of the population has received at least one dose, according to Our World in Data, with some African countries just beginning to give their first shots. “We know that all pandemics come to an end,” said Dr Jeremy Brown, director of emergency care research at the National Institutes of Health, who wrote a book on influenza. “They can do terrible things while they’re raging.” Covid-19 could have been far less lethal in the US if more people had gotten vaccinated faster, “and we still have an opportunity to turn it around”, Brown said. “We often lose sight of how lucky we are to take these things for granted.”
