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COVID-19 has now killed as many people in the United States as the 1918 influenza pandemic, which is often cited as the most severe pandemic in recent history, according to the Associated Press.
As of Tuesday, September 21, more than 676,200 people have died in the United States from COVID-19, according to the Johns Hopkins dashboard. The 1918-19 influenza pandemic is believed to have killed an estimated 675,000 people in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
But it is not known exactly how many people died a century ago, due to incomplete records and a poor understanding of the cause of the disease, according to the AP.
Related: 20 of the worst epidemics and pandemics in history
Global mortality from COVID-19 – estimated at around 4.7 million deaths to date – is nowhere near the global deaths from the 1918 flu, an estimated number of more than 50 million.
Of course, a comparison of apples to apples doesn’t reveal the true picture of either pandemic, as many factors have changed over the past century.
On the one hand, the population of the United States was about a third of what it is today, which means that the flu of 1918 wiped out more of the population than the COVID-19 pandemic did. has done so so far, according to the AP. (And the world’s population was about a quarter of what it is today.)
On the other hand, there have been significant scientific advances over the past century, including three vaccines currently available against COVID-19 in the United States.
Not only were vaccines not available in 1918, they also lacked antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections at the time, according to the AP. The 1918 flu killed healthy young adults in far greater numbers than COVID-19, which disproportionately targeted the older and more vulnerable population.
There are currently around 1,900 COVID-related deaths per day, on average in the United States, and projections from the University of Washington suggest 100,000 more deaths related to the disease in the United States by January 1, 2022 , according to the AP.
About 64% of the eligible population in the United States (those 12 years of age or older) are now fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
Only about 43% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, with just 2% of people in low-income countries having received a dose, according to our World in Data. (Vaccines are still not readily available in many countries around the world.)
COVID-19 would have been much less deadly in the United States, where vaccines are readily available, if more people had been vaccinated quickly. “We still have the opportunity to turn the tide,” Dr. Jeremy Brown, director of emergency care research at the National Institutes of Health, told the AP. “We often lose sight of how lucky we are to take these things for granted.”
We do not yet know how the COVID-19 pandemic will be remembered in relation to the 1918 flu. You would like to say that the worst in human history will not be remembered,.
“We have a lot more infection control, a lot more ability to support sick people. We have modern medicine,” Ann Marie Kimball, retired professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington told the AP. . “But we have a lot more people and a lot more mobility. … The fear is that a new strain will end up bypassing a particular vaccine target.”
Read the original Associated Press article here.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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