Thread by @hahnscratch

I’ve seen this floating around lately. While I understand the sentiment of the list, it’s WRONG. Here’s why (thread):

Since we’re trying to place #COVID19 in the list, we also have to include the Spanish Flu. They didn’t do day-by-day tracking of death back then, but we do have monthly tabulations. They’re astonishing.

In October of 1918, more than 195,000 Americans died of the Spanish Flu. That averages out to 6,290 deaths per day in that month, more than double the number of people currently perishing of #covid19 in America. But we can’t just put the Spanish Flu at #2 in the list...

The list is of individual days in American history. So, if we’re going to include the Spanish Flu of October 1918, we have to include ALL 31 DAYS of the month in the list. Thus, the Spanish Flu would be #2 through #32 on the list - each day at 6,290 people dead.

This ignores escalation in September of 1918 and deescalation in November (which I don’t have data for). Assuming death counts grew gradually and diminished gradually, we can at least speculate that the death total on September 30th and November 1st were greater than 3,000...

Thus, October 1918 was likely bookended by two months with greater daily death tolls than what we are currently experiencing with #covid19. Growing to the average daily death count of 6,290 in October doesn’t happen overnight, nor does it go away swiftly.

This is not meant to take away from the tragedy of today’s pandemic, but factually speaking #COVID19 doesn’t break the top 30 of most deadly days in American history (and likely doesn’t break the top 50).

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