A USA Today headline on Monday offered what appears to be a very alarming observation: “10,000 dead of coronavirus in USA, more fatalities than six wars combined.”
It seems bad, but it fails to contextualize American military history. This number exceeds the killed-in-action rates of six wars, but it doesn’t come close to the total deaths resulting from those wars. More to the point, those six wars were not representative of the casualty counts more often seen in American history. For example, in just one battle that was underway 75 years ago today, that of Okinawa, more than 12,000 Americans were killed in action.
By the end of the Second World War, more than 400,000 Americans had fallen. Nearly 120,000 Americans fell in the First World War, and more than 200,000 Americans lost their lives in the Civil War from battle wounds alone. Judged against the populations of those times, those figures are even more significant.
My point here is that some wars are a lot bloodier than others.
Four of the six wars that USA Today identifies, the Mexican-American War, the Indian wars, and the Spanish-American War, were essentially skirmishes fought without the massed concentration of force that generally comes to mind when we think of war. And thanks to overwhelming air supremacy, Desert Shield/Desert Storm’s ground war lasted less than a week.
A public health context also matters here. After all, government figures suggest that America suffers nearly 650,000 annual deaths to heart disease, nearly 90,000 annual deaths due to alcoholism, more than 65,000 due to drug overdoses, more than 30,000 in vehicle accidents, and generally more than 35,000 annual deaths to flu. So while the U.S. coronavirus death toll is likely to rival these (and would be worse if we were not taking aggressive countermeasures), we must keep those casualties in the context of these other concerns.
We must also remember that many of those falling to coronavirus have underlying health conditions or age-compromised immune systems. Not every coronavirus death that occurs this year will have been an additional death over what we might have expected otherwise.
So yes, this is indeed a terrible crisis, but it’s somewhat misleading to suggest that it is worse than multiple wars.
