A memorial to the victims of the Covid-19 epidemic has been set up in the center of Washington. Each deceased person is marked with a white flag.
The number of coronavirus deaths in the United States reached 695,000 people as of September 20, 2021. This was reported by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, which collects and publishes data on the global pandemic.
Since the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919, considered the deadliest in American history, some 675,000 people have died. Now Covid-19 has set a new sad record.
“The fact that so many people have died, given the achievements of modern medicine, is abnormal and very disturbing,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Medical-Biological Institute in La Jolla, California, noting that “a hundred years ago there were no ventilators or vaccines.
Recently, coronaviruses have been killing an average of 1900 people a day in the United States. This is the highest number since the beginning of March this year. Scientists attribute this to the emergence of the delta and iota strains, which have increased infectivity and lethality.
On September 10, President Joe Biden introduced mandatory vaccination for government officials and employees of private companies with more than 100 employees. An alternative is a weekly COVID-19 test. On Independence Day, July 4, Biden promised the nation “independence from the virus,” but the disease is not receding.
Today, 64% of adult Americans are fully vaccinated, lower than the rates in several European countries and Canada. Many refuse the vaccine on principle. Biden referred to them as “an obvious minority holding back a breakthrough.
The United States has long led the world in the number of deaths and people infected with Covid-19 (43.1 million people). Only small countries and territories – Georgia, Slovenia, Montenegro, the Seychelles and the Maldives, French Polynesia, Andorra, San Marino and Gibraltar – are ahead in terms of the number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
“Anti-vaccine marches in the U.S. draw tens of thousands of people.” In total, 230 million people worldwide have been sickened, more than 4.7 million have died, and nearly one hundred thousand people are in serious and critical condition.
China, where the pandemic began, has dealt with it best, ranking 109th on Johns Hopkins University’s list of most affected countries. In Russia, which ranks fifth, more than 7.3 million people were infected and nearly 200,000 died.
The Spanish flu pandemic, colloquially known as “Spanish flu,” broke out in Europe during the final stages of World War I and spread to every continent except Antarctica within a matter of weeks. It is still not known where the virus originated or why it disappeared on its own some two years later.
The origin of the “Spanish flu” pandemic is also not well understood. Since the first cases of the disease with symptoms resembling those of Spanish flu were recorded in the United States in January 1918, some researchers believe that American soldiers brought it to Europe, where it spread rapidly due to the difficult sanitary and epidemiological conditions during the war. The disease was called “Spanish” because the censorship of the warring countries did not allow information about it to be published, and the neutral Spanish press was the first to report the disaster.
This is what Red Cross teams looked like in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1918. They were specially trained to deal with patients suffering from the “Spanish flu”. Approximately 550 million people worldwide were infected with the “Spanish Flu” and about 50 million people died, roughly the same number of victims of World War II.
In Russia, the number of victims of the “Spanish flu” was not officially counted due to the civil war, but it is estimated to have exceeded one million people, which is approximately equal to the combat losses of the Red Army.
The deadliest infection in the history of the world is the plague. The most tragic were the Justinian Plague of 541-750 in Europe and the Eurasian Pandemic of 1346-1353, known as the Black Death. Each of these epidemics killed about 100 million people.