To date, more than 42 million coronavirus infections have been reported in the United States
As of Friday, September 17, about 670,000 people had died in the United States after being infected with SARS-CoV-2, with more than 11,000 deaths caused by coronavirus in the past week, according to aggregate data from covid.cdc.gov.
The number of deaths caused by Covid-19 had already exceeded the 1968 flu balance last year (about 100,000). According to the official website of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Spanish flu has killed about 675,000 people in the United States.
Although coronavirus deaths have surpassed the 1918-19 pandemic, the Spanish flu – caused by the H1N1 virus – has killed a much larger percentage of all US citizens compared to the Covid-19 pandemic. In 1920, the country’s population was 106 million people, compared to 331.5 million in 2020.
Because there is no vaccine or treatment for the Spanish flu, the mortality rate has been much higher compared to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, affecting almost all age groups equally, says the CDC.
“The high number of deaths among healthy people aged 20-40 marked a unique feature of the 1918 pandemic,” the institution added.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the Spanish flu has killed about 50 million people globally, compared to 4.7 million deaths caused by Covid-19.
However, it should be noted that the balance of the pandemics of 1918 and 1968 are crude estimates, noting the poor reporting processes and the number of deaths in those periods.
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