From Bloomberg Opinion: How Covid's Toll Compares With Other Things That Kill Us

Stacking up the disease's impact on young and old against other causes of death in the U.S., including influenza, heart disease, car accidents and drownings.

Over the past year the death toll from Covid-19 has been compared to deaths from lots of other causes, ranging from seasonal influenza to war to heart disease to car accidents to swimming-pool drownings.

At 500,000 and counting, U.S. Covid fatalities are now a lot higher than annual deaths from most of those other things. They’re also much higher than any short-term infectious-disease outbreak since the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 675,000 people in the U.S., the proportionate equivalent of 2.2 million in today’s more-populous country. The 1957-1958 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 116,000, the equivalent of 223,000 today. HIV/AIDS has killed an estimated 700,000 Americans, but over four decades.

The overall number isn’t the whole story. Eighty-one percent of U.S. Covid fatalities have been people 65 and older. There’s nothing unusual about this age profile — in fact, the different age groups’ share of Covid deaths is strikingly similar to their share of deaths, period.

There are lots of tables for comparison.