Seven Months Of COVID-19 Cost U.S. Half As Many Lives As Nearly Four Years Of World War II – Above the Law
Posted By admin on October 8, 2020
World War II was the deadliest armed conflict in world history. Almost all of the worlds countries were involved, and the United States played a major role. From the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to Japans eventual signing of formal surrender documents onboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, U.S. troops fought and died during nearly four years of brutal combat in theaters that spanned the globe.
According to the National WWII Museum, the United States suffered 416,800 military deaths throughout the course of the conflict. With civilian deaths included, the U.S. lost 418,500 to World War II. At the time, there were hardly any American families that didnt have members serving in uniform. By the end of WWII, almost everyone knew someone who had perished in the war effort.
The war deaths were an immediate, stinging reminder of the stakes. But the historical echoes of World War II reverberate even today, eight decades later. It profoundly changed the world.
There were those who spoke out against the U.S. becoming involved in WWII. Most of them fell silent after Pearl Harbor. Later, when it became clear what the Germans were doing to Jews under Nazi leadership, a virulent strain of right-wing Holocaust denial took root it survives (and in some dark circles, thrives) to this day.
But even among those who thought the U.S. should stay out of World War II, or who denied the full depth of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, almost nobody simply denied that World War II was happening. Almost nobody downplayed its seriousness. Almost nobody said that we should not worry about WWII, because it was mostly killing only young men within a certain age range, and therefore the vast majority of Americans had nothing to worry about.
The first U.S. case of COVID-19 was reported in January, but the deaths did not begin to trickle in on a large scale until late March of this year. New York recorded its first COVID-19 death on March 14, and from there things quickly got worse. There were many days this spring when more than 2,000 Americans were dying of the virus every day. Throughout the summer and into the fall, there have been repeated spikes of more than 1,000 deaths per day.
As I write this, the United States has lost at least 209,600 people to the coronavirus. By the time this article goes to print, that number will have increased by hundreds, and by the time youre reading it, that number likely will have increased by thousands. From mid-March of this year to early October, we lost half as many Americans to COVID-19 as we lost to WWII, with no end in sight.
In response to a previous column about COVID-19, I got a piece of hate mail. The medical examiner apparently deemed the cause of death of this correspondents loved one to be COVID-19, whereas he claimed, using some pretty colorful language, it was dementia. President Donald Trump, who is himself laid up with a case of COVID-19, was an early and vocal denier of the seriousness of the coronavirus, and his legions of unthinking supplicants were quick to follow suit. There are millions of these people in the U.S. They will defend the backward idea of COVID-19 being a hoax that every educated person everywhere is in on, even as theyre losing their own family members and as their president convalesces with the virus. I bet no grieving family members during WWII ever got together at a wake and waved away the seriousness of war because their loved one would have died of something else eventually anyway.
The deaths matter though. The U.S. was a very different place in the early 1940s. We had a smaller population. We had a president who was a tested leader, not one who is a failed, barely literate real estate developer. We were more united (maybe more united than at any other time in our national history). But then, just like now, we couldnt simply soak up the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our countrymen without effect.
It took less than seven months to lose half as many Americans to COVID-19 as we lost to almost four years of WWII. Even if the deaths stopped today, this pandemic is going to change America. I just hope enough of us make the right decision as to how.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldnt want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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