The coronavirus has officially killed more Americans than World War II.
The number of confirmed Covid-19 deaths in the United States has now surpassed 400,000, and that devastating toll is set to grow in the coming weeks with the US still averaging more than 3,300 deaths every single day. In just the 11 months since the country’s first confirmed death from Covid-19, the disease has killed as many Americans as US soldiers who died during four years of World War II. That figure is also almost surely an undercount. The number of excess deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic (the number of deaths that have occurred in excess of what would ordinarily be expected based on long-running trends) is closer to 500,000, according to some recent estimates. Some of the additional 100,000 deaths may not be from the coronavirus — they could, instead, be people who couldn’t get adequate medical care because health systems have been strained by the pandemic — but experts think a substantial portion probably are uncounted Covid-19 deaths.
