I posted a table about a week ago showing the number of American deaths per day from various disasters that we've had over our history. I did a bit more research, and we've had a lot more Covid-19 deaths, so I've updated the table:
- Average daily deaths from 1918 flu, October 1918: 6,290
- Galveston hurricane, 9 Sep 1900: ~6,000
- Battle of Antietam, 18 Sep 1862: 3,652
- Covid-19, 9 Dec 2020: 3,411
- Puerto Rico hurricane, 7 Aug 1899: 3,389
- Covid-19, 6 Apr 2020: 3,156
- San Francisco Earthquake, 18 Apr 1906: ~3,100
- Covid-19, 11 Dec 2020: 3,013
- Terrorist attacks, 11 Sep 2001: 2,996
- Covid-19, 3 Dec 2020: 2,861
Pearl Harbor, formerly 8th on this list, has dropped to 19th.
I also corrected the durations and total counts for this chart, which I've posted a few times. Note that Covid-19 is even more clearly the most deadly disaster in American history on an annualized basis, and the third worst catastrophe after our annual heart disease and cancer mortality:
And to think, if we'd had (a) leadership and (b) a more mature populace, we might have prevented most of those deaths.