The United States of Death

I saw a meme going around for a few days and when my own father reposted it, I thought I would investigate further. I don’t normally repost or engage with memes that share “facts’ or “data” because I feel like those things can be manipulated or taken out of context very easily. But this one is pretty straight forward: It says that “1 in 2000 Americans alive at the start of 2020 have died from COVID19” The first time I saw it I thought to myself “that can’t be right, that seems a little high.” When My own father reposted this meme I decided to double check myself. 

According to several sources that I tracked down, there are approximately 330,000,000 people living in the United states. So far, there have been 5,340,232 total cases of COVID19 in the US, with about 168,696 deaths. Doing some simple math we can see that 333,000,000 divided by 168,696 = 1,973, which I would gladly round up to 2,000. So yes, about 1in every 2,000 citizens in the US has died from C19 so far.  We can also see that around 1 in 60 people have had confirmed cases. This is pretty staggering when you break it down to such small clusters.

I think that as a culture we tend not to sympathize with a plight until it has affected us personally. I do know a handful of people personally that have gotten C19, and know second-hand of a few other that have died from it. But working out these numbers for myself really drives home just how close to my doorstep this is. The fact that we still know next to nothing for absolute sure about this disease should worry everyone who leaves their home and interacts with strangers. One thing we do know about this disease is that it is incredibly easy to carry and spread. I see this all ending only one of two ways: 

Either everyone finally catches it (with many more deaths), 

Or we start being more careful and no one else catches it ever again, preventing the virus from spreading. 

Which will it be? 

References

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/downloads/2019-ncov-factsheet.pdf