COVID-19 Kills More US Citizens Than Two Decades Of The Vietnam War

Vietnam War (Wikimedia Commons)

JAKARTA - The number of deaths due to COVID-19 in the United States (US) has now exceeded the number of victims of the Vietnam war (1957-1975). As is known, the US is now the country with the most cases of the corona virus in the world.

According to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University, the death toll from the corona virus in the US reached 58,365. That figure already exceeds the death toll of American citizens in the Vietnam war that lasted nearly two decades, at 58,220, according to the NPR.

Meanwhile, the death rate due to COVID-19 is almost the same as the number of victims of the Vietnam war, the death rate due to the corona virus is much higher. It is now known that the death rate from the disease is around 17.6 deaths per hundred thousand population.

1968 was the deadliest year for Americans in Vietnam. Because, in that year, the number of deaths due to war over this influence was recorded at 16,899. The death rate for US soldiers that year was only half the death rate of the pandemic, namely 8.5 people killed for every hundred thousand US population.

The pandemic's casualty toll, which averaged nearly 2,000 in six consecutive days this month, also exceeded the highest daily toll during the Vietnam War on January 31, 1968, when 246 US troops died during Operation Tet.

All parallel data between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Vietnam war are broadcast by the media. However, the difference between the five presidents - from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford - who held power during the Vietnam conflict only occasionally spoke publicly about the war.

Meanwhile, currently the opposite is true, President Donald Trump is establishing himself as a wartime leader against corona and dominating news conferences broadcast live on television. Most nights from the White House.

Trump's claims at his press conference included saying his government had extraordinary control over the virus to the point of promising to eliminate it "miraculously". But the facts are inversely proportional to what he says.

Other data parallels close to the total deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic so far could be the 2017-1018 flu season which was the deadliest in the last decade. There were 61 thousand deaths due to influenza nationally reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in a period of about eight months.