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As the United States passes the tragic mark of half a million deaths as a direct result of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s important to make sure that we learn as many lessons as possible from the past 12 months. Governments and scientists will have their own lessons to learn, but for everyone else, one of the key things to remember will be just how many know-nothing idiots were telling us that Covid-19 is “just another bad flu”.
All throughout the current pandemic, we’ve been forced to listen to significant numbers of truly mindless and uninformed people telling everyone that Covid-19 is a hoax, that it’s just another flu, that we’re all overreacting, and that everyone should go about their lives as normal. The same people kept telling us that the restrictions put in place in an attempt to protect the population were somehow an infringement of their civil liberties.
500,000 deaths highlight just how wrong these people were and it’s time to call them out for what they are – selfish, self-centered, idiots whose opinions should never be sought or listened to again.
Here’s a little bit of reality for the Covid-deniers.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC):
- The estimated number of deaths from influenza hasn’t risen above 61,000 in any season in the past ten years.
- In 6 of the past 10 flu seasons, the estimated death toll didn’t exceed 38,000
- The total estimated death toll from influenza in the past ten seasons combined is 359,000.
The number of people who have died in the US from Covid-related reasons in 1 year is approximately 40% higher than the total estimated deaths from the flu in the past 10 years.
Let me put a bit more emphasis on that statistic.
Despite all the lockdowns and the public health measures that have been put in place over the past 12 months (measures that most Covidiots fought hard to undo), we have lost around 140,000 more people to Covid-19 in a single year than we’ve lost to the flu in the past ten years…and we don’t have lockdowns, stay-at-home-orders, mask-wearing, or travel bans when the flu is around.
So much for Covid-19 being “just another bad flu”. If things are this bad now, can you imagine how bad things would have been if the Covidiots got their way?
Trying to comprehend a statistic as mind-boggling as 500,000 deaths can be tricky, so allow me to put it into a little bit of context.
Losing half a million people is approximately the equivalent of the following:
- The entire population of Atlanta being wiped out; or
- The entire population of Miami being wiped out; or
- The total estimated number of US deaths in the second world war, the Vietnam war, and the Korean war combined; or
- The attendance at the 2019 Super Bowl being wiped out seven times over.
As the BBC put it:
If you held a minute’s silence consecutively for every person who has died from Covid in the United States, it would take almost a full year, to honor them all.
Just as we should never forget the tragic loss of life that Covid-19 has brought with it, we should also never forget the people who have consistently denied the severity of the virus and the people who have been resisting all the efforts being made to try to reduce the spread of the virus.
The anti-maskers, the self-professed “freedom lovers”, and those who have refused to show even the slightest bit of consideration for those around them are all at least partly culpable for the high death toll in the United States.
Their selfishness, their stupidity, and their reluctance or inability to absorb facts are at least partly to blame for the most powerful nation on earth losing 500,000 people to the virus.
That’s something we should never forget. More importantly, that’s something that we should never let them forget.
Stupidity in humans can be a funny thing to observe (it’s why reality TV is so popular), but it stops being funny when it starts to cost lives. This time, it has cost far too many lives and, if nothing else, that’s a lesson we should make sure we take away from this disaster.
Note: I have closed off comments from this post as I have no intention of giving the Covidiots a platform or a right of response – they deserve neither.
