COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)

Optimus Prime said
Came across this
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As of May 7, 2020, 76,503 Americans are confirmed dead of COVID-19. To put this in perspective:

58, 209 Americans died in the Vietnam War (1961-1975)

54, 246 Americans died in the Korean War (1950-1953)

25, 000 Americans died in the American Revolution (1775-1783)

15, 000 Americans died in the War of 1812 (1812-1815)

13, 283 Americans died in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848)

4,576 Americans died in the Iraq War (2003-2011)

Also: The annual number of deaths in the USA from infectious disease is about 75,000. That’s twelve months’ worth of deaths. We are slightly over the annual death count for infectious disease after only four months and seven days.

Don’t kid yourself that this is normal. This is not even remotely normal.

That would be good perspective if we were dealing with a military conflict. But since we aren't one might think this is simply sensationalism. A better comparison would be other pandemic level spreads of infectious disease, such as the Spanish flu.

I don't think anyone is saying this is particularly normal in the sense that it's not routine from year to year. But it might be considered somewhat 'normal' in the sense that there is historical precedent and the event was somewhat predictable from a long term point of view. It's bound to happen. We just happen to be part of the generation that experiences it.