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Mar. 3, 2021
The news last week that the United States had suffered 500,000 coronavirus deaths was accompanied by commentary noting that the toll was higher than the combined American death toll from World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. That was a dramatic comparison but an unfounded one: Every year more people die of natural causes than in war. It would be fairer to compare the COVID toll to deaths from natural causes.
There’s no comparison between the 5,700 Israelis who have died from the coronavirus thus far and the 2,700 soldiers killed in the Yom Kippur War. The Yom Kippur dead were mostly young people, making their mortality rate many times higher than for their age group than in normal times.