The COVID-19 pandemic has been going on for a while and now we have some real numbers that show just how bad it has been. Looking at the graph we can see that the death rate has been increasing, but it is still not as high as it was in the 1950s and 1960s.
The lowest rate in this period of time was 8.124 deaths per one thousand people in 2008. The highest rate was 9.649 in 1950, the first year in this record.
A difference of one or two deaths in a group of a thousand people does not seem to be much, so how do we get hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths? Simply multiply take that one or two and multiply by 330,000 and all of sudden you've got hundreds of thousands. (You get 330,000 by taking the population of the United States (331,893,745) and divide it by 1,000.)
While we may have found some ways to help people live longer and so decreased the death rate over the last 50 years, we may also have created a more fragile elderly population who are more susceptible to new agents of destruction.
Data from Macrotrends
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