I noted that if patterns continued, it would be a matter of days before the number of deaths from COVID-19 surpassed the total number of casualaties from the Vietnam War. Now according to NPR, this exact situation has come to pass.
In not even three months since the first known U.S. deaths from COVID-19, more lives have now been lost to the coronavirus pandemic on U.S. soil than the 58,220 Americans who died over nearly two decades in Vietnam.
Early Tuesday evening ET, the U.S. death toll reached 58,365, according to Johns Hopkins University.
While the number of lives lost in the U.S. during the pandemic and the U.S. death toll in that war are roughly the same now, the death rate from the coronavirus in America is considerably higher. It now stands at about 17.6 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.
During 1968, the deadliest year for the U.S. in Vietnam, the death toll of 16,899 occurred at about half the pandemic’s rate — 8.5 troops were killed for every 100,000 U.S. residents.
The pandemic has also been marked by nationwide death tolls surpassing 2,000 on six days this month. The highest daily toll for Americans fighting in the Vietnam War was on Jan. 31, 1968, when 246 U.S. personnel were killed during the Tet Offensive. (source)
If 58,000 people died in a war, anybody would be concerned. But Vietnam took place over almost twenty years.
It has not even been twenty weeks, and more people have died from COVID-19.
In fact, scientists still do not understand how this virus is mutating the way it is, or how to control it.
Given there are both lethal and non-lethal strains of it going around but with no information as to what is where makes the disease all the more deadly.
It is true that this disease is being used to advance malicious causes, but this does not mean that the disease itself is a non-existent conspiracy. To the contrary, the disease is like a onion- a series of layers that one cannot stop peeling away and keeps giving continually.