Will this be the deadliest pandemic ever for USA? Looks like it

[SoonerPride]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/world/Covid-deaths-Biden.html

Biden’s chief of staff is predicting 500,000 deaths by March 1.

The 1916 flu pandemic killed an estimated 650,000

We will most likely blow past that number.

Will we end up at a million dead?

Officials in the incoming Biden administration braced the country for continued hardship in the days after the inauguration, with the president-elect assuming control of a struggling economy and surging coronavirus outbreak in less than three days.

Ron Klain, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s incoming White House chief of staff, had a dire forecast for the course of the coronavirus outbreak in the new administration’s first weeks, predicting that half a million Americans will have died from the coronavirus by the end of February. The current toll is nearing 400,000.

“The virus is going to get worse before it gets better,” Mr. Klain said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “People who are contracting the virus today will start to get sick next month, will add to the death toll in late February, even March, so it’s going to take a while to turn this around.”

Average daily U.S. deaths from the virus have risen to well past 3,000, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sounded the alarm about a fast-spreading, far more contagious variant of the coronavirus that officials project will become the dominant source of infection in the country by March, potentially fueling another wrenching surge of cases and deaths.

More at the linky link above.

[captain queeg]

1. Those people who say it's just a flu...

That’s kind of correct but not comparing the results to most modern variants for which there are wide spread effective vaccines. The Spanish flu was just the flu but killed millions world wide. I know many people acted stupidly back then but I bet most of them lined up once there was a vaccine.

[Mariana]

2. There was no vaccine.

It just went on until it burned itself out.

[Mariana]

3. Can you imagine what the death toll would look like

if we had to rely on 1918 medicine? Yikes.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. 1918, not 1916. Keep in mind that the population of this country was something

like 103 million in 1918. Less than a third of today's population.

So we'd need to have some 2 million people die from Covid to reach the same percentage of the population.