If COVID Were a War

Update (2022-03-25): I’ve manually updated the graph with the current fatality count from the CDC.

Update (2021-03-07): The COVID Tracking Project stopped collecting data on March 7, 2021, so this chart no longer updates automatically.

Fatalities from COVID-19 continue to rise in the US. I’ve been having a difficult time wrapping my mind around the staggering numbers involved, so, characteristically, I made a graph.

This compares US fatalities from all causes¹ in some notable conflicts with American deaths from COVID-19. It pulls live statistics from the COVID Tracking Project, so I expect it’ll change over time.

I’ve also included an upper estimate on US deaths from the 1918–1919 Spanish flu to compare COVID to another worldwide respiratory pandemic.

In some wars a majority of deaths were from disease, not combat. A previous draft of this graph included only combat fatalities, but as the COVID death toll has risen I’ve switched to total mortality. ↩

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