![]() ![]() Nurses work on the "frontlines." Coronavirus is described as an invisible "enemy." The country is "battling" the virus.Īs a metaphor, "war" becomes a call to action, and a recognition of sacrifice "You can't just try to sum up in a simple statistic, how big is this disaster versus that disaster, as if they can even be summed up in a simple number at all."Īnd yet the language of warfare permeates so much of the national discourse about the pandemic. "We've really changed how we think about war, in a way that is misleading and distorting - this idea you can kind of sum up the toll of a war just by counting the bodies from the battlefield," Biagetti says.įor all these reasons, Biagetti worries about comparing the current pandemic to any war, even if just for the purpose of counting the dead. Biagetti points out that World War II was the first conflict in American history in which combat killed more fighters than disease, a pattern which has continued since and reflects medical advances such as vaccines and antibiotics. ![]() In fact, before World War II, combatants were far more likely to die of an infectious disease than from battle-related trauma. "All those millions of deaths were another outcome of the war, and people didn't understand them necessarily as two separate phenomena," he says. The flu pandemic 100 years ago was fueled by the conditions of World War I and ultimately killed more people than the war, with an estimated 50 million flu deaths worldwide and upwards of 700,000 flu deaths in the U.S. "Through the vast majority of human history, people have understood warfare and disease to go hand in hand and to be inextricably linked," says Biagetti, who is the creator and host of the podcast Historiansplaining. The effort to compare the death toll of the pandemic with that of a war strikes historian Sam Biagetti as an especially "modern" exercise. When we do compare death tolls, what exactly are we comparing? "People were so used to mortality because of the war that even the horrible tallies that were coming with the Spanish influenza had lost their capacity to horrify the way that one might expect," he says. Unlike COVID-19, the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19 killed many people who were in their 20s and 30s - yet as Snowden notes, there wasn't much collective mourning for those young adults, despite dying in the prime of life. "But, I don't think we have a right to weigh up lives and say which is more important," Snowden added. "To the watching world, that's not the same as the death of a young soldier in their 20s, let's say, on the front lines in a war," says Yale historian Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Societies tend to valorize those who died for a cause on a battlefield.īut in this pandemic it's the frail elderly - many of them living in nursing homes and assisted living facilities - who have died in vast numbers. The notion that combat deaths carry a unique meaning or value is deeply rooted in human culture. "I try not to make comparisons to an event or group that I know contains within it a great deal of sentiment, feeling and pain," says Markel, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America and the Fears They Have Unleashed. Howard Markel to make it a practice of never drawing parallels between the death toll from war and a pandemic. This type of response, over time, has convinced medical historian Dr. ![]() "It is extremely disrespectful to our nation's veterans, who write a blank check with their lives, to defend our Constitution." "This is comparing apples to oranges," wrote NPR listener Kris Petron in December, in response to a story that made use of that comparison. Which raises the question: Are we as a society too quick to reach for these historical comparisons? Should a politically driven world war and a biologically driven pandemic, more than seven decades apart, be put side by side at all? The true emotional and social impact of either event can never be quantified, but many media outlets still mentioned it. It is certainly a morally fraught exercise. reached - and then exceeded - the 405,399 Americans who died in World War II.įor many, attempting to compare the two death tolls - or even take note of their brief conjunction - is misguided or even offensive. ![]() 21, 2021 offered another opportunity for historical comparison: That was the day when the COVID death toll in the U.S. (Currently, more than 3,000 Americans are dying from COVID every day.) Many have turned to history, citing Pearl Harbor (2,403 killed) or the 9/11 attacks (at least 2,977 killed), as a way of providing perspective when the number of daily COVID deaths in the U.S. ![]()
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