On September 11, 2001, I had just returned from a trip to Mexico to visit my relatives early that morning. I woke up later to every channel on television covering the images of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, with smoke billowing and covering the top floors. Minutes later, a second jet airplane struck the South Tower. By the end of the day, almost 3,000 people died from the terrorist attacks. The world changed quickly in the ensuing hours, days, and weeks. And many of those changes triggered by those attacks are still with us twenty years later.
Before the 9/11 attacks, the most loss of life in a single day in the United States was the Galveston Hurricane on September 8, 1900. During that hurricane landfall in Texas, between 8,000 and 12,000 people died. (The estimate is a range because detailed records were difficult to ascertain due to the storm's destruction of civil registries.) Before that, the Battle of Antietam during the American Civil War resulted in 3,650 soldiers from both sides dying. The deaths from these three events are considered non-natural, meaning they did not result from a natural cause (old age, or a chronic disease process such as cancer or diabetes).
During the Spanish Influenza pandemic, an estimated 675,000 deaths occurred in the United States due to influenza. In October 1918, Philadelphia saw 11,000 of its residents die. The United States saw 195,000 deaths that month. Adjusting for population changes, those 675,000 deaths account for about 0.65% of the country's population (about 103 million at the time). During the current COVID-19 pandemic, the United States saw several days that exceeded the deaths in Antietam, Galveston, or New York & Virginia.
This week, , the disease caused by the novel coronavirus (SARS CoV-2) first detected in the Wuhan Province of China in late 2019. Adjusting for population, this represents 0.3% of the total population. One million people with family and friends, with jobs, and contributors to society have so far died from this pandemic. While the proportion compared to the Spanish Influenza pandemic is lower, the COVID-19 pandemic is not over yet.
Other differences between this pandemic and the Spanish Influenza pandemic include more availability of medications to handle the symptoms and complications from COVID-19, including any bacterial co-infections. There are also antiviral medications. Most importantly, in the United States, three highly-effective vaccines are available, with one available for people ages 5 and older. Even with pockets of resistance to vaccination, an estimated 78% of the population (as of May 5, 2022) have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Slightly over 2/3 of US residents have received the necessary doses to be considered "fully immunized."
There is much academic and social debate on how many deaths from COVID-19 can be directly attributed to the infection, versus how many people died with COVID-19 as a contributing factor. For example, a person who was otherwise healthy catches the disease, goes into respiratory arrest, and dies could be considered a COVID-19 death without much debate. But what if a person with advanced cancer or diabetes catches COVID-19? How much did the disease accelerate that person's path to death? Whatever the answer is, COVID-19 did spike the number of unexpected deaths, and it took a bite out of life expectancy in the United States.
The arrival of the two mRNA vaccines and the one viral vector vaccine against COVID-19 did create an epidemiologic shift in the effects of the pandemic on the United States. The pandemic became a pandemic mostly of the unvaccinated. While those who were vaccinated did not lower their risk of infection or disease to zero, they significantly reduced those risks compared to the unvaccinated. In several well-vaccinated states, deaths from COVID-19 shifted to being almost exclusively among the unvaccinated. Today, in May 2022, the shift is happening toward school-aged children in terms of cases. With lower vaccination rates, and no vaccine authorized for use in children under five, children have become a bigger proportion of cases than ever during the pandemic.
Before we close this blog post, let's do a few more comparisons:
- The number of people in the United States who have died from COVID-19 is now more than the population of Austin, Texas, the capital of that state.
- It also is more than the population of two Atlantas, a city in Georgia.
- The number is also more than 10 Metlife Stadiums, where the New York Giants and the New York Jets play.
- It is 20 Independence Stadiums, where the Independence Bowl is played in Shreveport, Louisiana.
- It is about 2,000 US commercial passenger Boeing 747 aircraft, depending on its configuration.
- Considering reduced driving from the pandemic in 2020, the number of dead is 25 times the number of automobile deaths in 2020.
- It is 226 times the number of Allied deaths on D-Day, the day of the storming of the beaches in Normandy during World War II.
Like 9/11 and other tragic moments in history, the COVID-19 pandemic has already changed the world, and it will continue to do so until it is over... And for some time after that.
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