Another milestone reached

A few days ago I mentioned that we were approaching 700K in deaths from the coronavirus. Well, yesterday we reached it. No other country in the world has a death rate like we do in the US. We tower over every country, even on a daily death basis.

When I was growing up, I read a lot of books covering different genres such as action thrillers, mysteries, fantasy and science fiction. One story plot came up maybe three or four times was the 1918 flu. The story plot left me with the impression that the flu pandemic was so dreadful and frightful that the characters in the book did not want to revive the virus. Certainly, I did not want to go through the 1918 flu type pandemic after reading those stories.

Yet, we’ve been living through it since 2020.

No wonder people are not handling this well. Violence is up. Customers are behaving rudely toward those employees who are just enforcing either company rules or the laws of their state/city/local government. Parents are either verbally attacking school boards or coming close to physical attacks. And it feels like we have a set of people that want to deny the existence of this coronavirus such that they just want to go about their business without the masks, the social distancing or the vaccination. Pretend like we are not undergoing a pandemic and just go back to pre-2020 behaviors.

In absolute numbers, the death count from Covid-19 has exceeded that from the 1918 flu but percentage-wise, 1918 flu was worse. But still, in absolute terms, this pandemic has the worst death counts – I believe even worse than the wars.