# More US CV deaths than all but 3 US wars **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [April 24, 2020, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488 "2020-04-24T11:44:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/22 "2020-04-26T19:14:00Z")
> [@penultima\_thule](#): > > There’s a thought: > > Maybe you guys could consider the rivers of spondule flowing into the the military-industrial complex and divert some of it into a first world healthcare system? > > But it’s probably more likely that you’ll start another war. I don’t know what spondule is (is it as dirty as it sounds?), but I agree with this, and I’m from here. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/23 "2020-04-26T20:18:12Z")
> [@bobot](#): > > I don’t know what spondule is (is it as dirty as it sounds?), but I agree with this, and I’m from here. **Moderator Note** Please don’t respond to moderated posts. They’ve been moderated for a reason. Colibri Quarantine Zone Moderator ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2020, 10:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/24 "2020-04-27T10:08:41Z")
Sorry, I missed that. ---
**Author:** ![sitchensis](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sitchensis/32/4892_2.png) [@sitchensis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sitchensis)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2020, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/25 "2020-04-27T18:34:12Z")
I don’t really have much to say about it. My Dad was in Vietnam. I learned about it in school. I guess based on my FB feed it must not have been that big of a deal. 58,000 Americans dying in a decade, let alone a few months. I’m sure it was doctors calling everything a war death. It was no worse than the flu. ---
**Author:** ![casdave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c6cbf5/32.png) [@casdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/casdave)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2020, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/26 "2020-04-27T18:55:05Z")
There was a period where more Americans were dying from gun crime in one year then all the losses in Vietnam. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2020, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/27 "2020-04-27T19:20:09Z")
> [@sitchensis](#): > > I don’t really have much to say about it. My Dad was in Vietnam. I learned about it in school. I guess based on my FB feed it must not have been that big of a deal. 58,000 Americans dying in a decade, let alone a few months. I’m sure it was doctors calling everything a war death. It was no worse than the flu. Merged with previous threads on coronavirus deaths compared to US wars. Colibri QZ Moderator ---
**Author:** ![Bijou\_Drains](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bijou_drains/32/2814_2.png) [@Bijou\_Drains](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bijou_Drains)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2020, 11:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/28 "2020-05-01T11:18:34Z")
Based on just combat deaths the total is now more than WW 1. And if the trend continues for another month it will be more than all US deaths in WW 1. Only Civil war and WW 2 will be higher. ---
**Author:** ![Horatius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/horatius/32/3572_2.png) [@Horatius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatius)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2020, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/29 "2020-05-01T13:51:18Z")
> [@Bijou\_Drains](#): > > Based on just combat deaths the total is now more than WW 1. And if the trend continues for another month it will be more than all US deaths in WW 1. Only Civil war and WW 2 will be higher. …for now. Every single one of these kinds of posts needs to have “for now” appended to it, because people will still be dying for weeks if not months to come. The number of new US cases has been oscillating around 30,000 for about a month now. It takes quite some time to actually die or recover from this, so the people dying now got sick anywhere from two weeks to a month ago. New US deaths have been oscillating around 2,000 for about the same amount of time. Even if we could magically make the number of new cases drop to zero overnight, we’d still expect about 2,000 deaths per day for the next two weeks to a month. So at least 28,000 new deaths, maybe 56,000 new deaths, and that’s only if we invent magic _right now_. With so many states pushing to re-open, some as early as [checks calendar] _ **TODAY?!?!** _ there’s simply no way the number of new infections per day is going to drop significantly, and it will probably rise. “For now”. Embrace it. ---
**Author:** ![casdave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c6cbf5/32.png) [@casdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/casdave)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2020, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/30 "2020-05-01T14:29:16Z")
Looking at Spain and Italy, it has taken just over a month to reduce the daily fatality numbers by 2/3, and that rate will continue to decline in a similar manner - so another month to get down to around 1/10 of the peak - and these nations had much more stringent lockdowns that anything seen in the US. Hopefully US did carry out social distance measures earlier in the cycle and perhaps health professionals have also learned more about how to improve outcomes for patients - but you would still expect - at best - the mortality rates to follow a similar profile so I expect we are looking at maybe another 40k by the end of May - at best. This might suggest 20-30k after that. Unfortunately the numbers of discovered infections implies a plateau for some time, therefore death figures would also follow that trend In other words in just two months around 95k people will have passed - I don’t know if this total meets with the approval of **Carryon** but these are, as I reiterate, at best figures since the US lockdown has been later in NY and NJ and much less stringent and quite a number of areas have not really been hit, along with the idiots protesting in places such as Michigan. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2020, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/31 "2020-05-01T14:55:34Z")
> [@Bijou\_Drains](#): > > In a week or so the number of CV deaths will be more than all US wars except WW 1, WW2 and Civil war. And in just 3 months. Just 3 months? Make that just one. In April alone, the U.S. had one COVID-19 death for every name on the Vietnam Memorial wall, plus a few hundred to spare. Quite an achievement. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![Dorjan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dorjan/32/12440_2.png) [@Dorjan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dorjan)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2020, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/32 "2020-05-01T18:13:12Z")
53,916 Americans die per MONTH from heart disease. It’s easy to throw these big numbers around. ---
**Author:** ![casdave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c6cbf5/32.png) [@casdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/casdave)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2020, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/33 "2020-05-01T18:43:00Z")
So am, I to believe that you think the US should do nothing and just let the virus rip through and take whomever it takes, after all everyone dies at sometime anyway? How many deaths would be acceptable per month? 50k? 100k? 250k? Worth noting that by taking action then many of these deaths are very preventable - but if its too much trouble to keep folk alive then fine - get along with justifying your stance. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2020, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/34 "2020-05-01T19:35:04Z")
What is the average monthly number of deaths from flu in the United States? I think that number would be the best comparator to try to assess the impact of the coronavirus. ---
**Author:** ![Dorjan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dorjan/32/12440_2.png) [@Dorjan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dorjan)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2020, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/35 "2020-05-01T19:40:55Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > What is the average monthly number of deaths from flu in the United States? > > I think that number would be the best comparator to try to assess the impact of the coronavirus. Roughly 5800 per month on the top end I think. COVID-19 definitely has the Flu beat. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2020, 10:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/36 "2020-05-02T10:23:31Z")
> [@Dorjan](#): > > 53,916 Americans die per MONTH from heart disease. It’s easy to throw these big numbers around. It’s easy to toss that one around, too. But it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. In the end, we’re not going to live forever. Let’s take an oversimplified population model: let’s say that the 330 million people in the U.S. are evenly distributed across the 0-99.99 age range, but everyone dies of old-age-related causes at age 100. That would mean 3.3 million people dying each year due to such causes. This is a crude model, but my point is that millions of Americans die each year because they got old and their bodies gradually failed. What cause of death was listed on their death certificates? For a good many, it was probably some form of heart failure. If you’re going to toss numbers like that around, it’s not meaningful as a comparison with COVID-19 deaths unless you can separate out the old-age deaths, and get a decent estimate of people who were taken early by heart disease, who had years ahead of them somewhere besides a nursing home bed if they had survived the heart episode. Because that’s where we are with COVID-19. While older people are more vulnerable to COVID-19, just like they are to heart disease, getting killed by the coronavirus is a life interrupted, rather than a consequence of the body’s inevitable breakdown. This is often the case for heart disease as well, but far from always. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2020, 10:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/37 "2020-05-02T10:39:35Z")
The other thing about comparing the coronavirus to heart disease is that _heart disease is not contagious_. The fact that some people have heart disease doesn’t mean the rest of us have to massively alter our lives to keep from getting it from them. But the coronavirus is quite contagious, so beginning in mid-March, stuff started shutting down. Within about a day and a half in the second week of March, the NBA, NHL, MLB, and the NCAA all decided to take a hiatus. At the beginning of that week, very few colleges and universities had closed; by the end of the week, hundreds had closed, or were just about to. Dozens of states announced that their school systems were shutting down for the time being. And things kept going from there: by the first week of April, all but a handful of states had required nonessential businesses to shut down, and instituted stay-at-home orders. And the coronavirus killed nearly 60,000 Americans last month _despite all that_. If we hadn’t done all that, the death toll would have been **massively** higher. The number of deaths due to heart disease is a business-as-usual number: it’s how many deaths we have due to that cause if we don’t have any sort of mass mobilization to prevent heart-related deaths. So the proper comparison to the 54K deaths per month due to heart disease is the hundreds of thousands of Americans who **would** have died in April if we’d proceeded with business as usual for another few weeks. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2020, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488/38 "2020-05-02T18:28:10Z")
This point is made in a recent study: [COVID-19 robs victims of at least one decade of life on average, analysis shows](https://nationalpost.com/news/covid-19-victims-losing-one-decade-of-life-on-average-analysis-shows). > [@](#): > > It’s a throwaway comment that’s been made by those accusing governments of overreacting to the coronavirus crisis, that most COVID-19 deaths are occurring in people who would have soon died anyway. > > So Dr. David McAllister and colleagues decided to measure the estimated number of years of life lost as a result of COVID-19. > > According to their analysis, men are losing, on average, 13 years of their lives, and women, 11 years. > > Even after accounting for high blood pressure, diabetes and other common chronic conditions found in people dying of the pandemic virus, death from COVID-19 resulted in more than a decade of life lost per person, the analysis shows, similar to the years of life lost from heart disease. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-us-cv-deaths-than-all-but-3-us-wars/852488.md?page=1)