The Coronavirus Has NOT Killed More Americans Than Six Wars Combined

Let me start this off by saying that, in this post, I'm not making any comment on the goodness or badness of quarantining. At least, not in this post. No, this is related more to the once-glorious profession of Edward R. Murrow: journalism.

I saw a headline from USA Today on Facebook a few days ago:

If you're like me, you read that headline and immediately thought, Which wars, exactly? Nearly 3,000 people died in 9/11. More than 2,000 Americans died at Pearl Harbor in ninety minutes. More than 2,000 American soldiers died at Omaha Beach--one of only five beaches in the D-Day landings--in one single day. That's only two wars and already 7,000 Americans. Exactly which wars are you talking about?

Even if you didn't think that, if 10,000 Americans died over six wars, that would mean an average of 1,667 Americans per war. If we have that many wars with fewer than 2,000 deaths in the entire war, how lucky are we! (And how realistic is that?)

This headline reads to me like scare-mongering. When you think of a war, you probably think immediately of WWI, WWII, and other high-fatality wars. War is bad--mass destruction, lots of death, horror, and many other images. You are clearly meant to think that when you read this headline. It's meant to be sensationalist.

But it's nonsense.

The Washington Examiner did a solid job skewering the logic of this article, but they didn't actually check the data. So I'm going to deal with the data today.

The source they use is from the VA (Veterans Affairs), which, for some reason, didn't include the Philippine-American War. I will use the same source for this post, but there are other sources that have different numbers for war fatalities. Furthermore, the VA only counts the deaths of actual servicemen and servicewomen, but anyone who has ever read about wars knows that civilians are killed in wars, too. If USA Today's point is that war is less deadly than a disease, they're skewering the data to prove their point.

Now, on to these wars: the six wars they mention are the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Indian Wars, and Operation Desert Storm.

Here are the fatalities of those six wars (of American soldiers only):
American Revolution: 4,435
The War of 1812: 2,260
The Mexican-American War: 13,283
The Indian Wars (1817-1898) 1,000
The Spanish-American War: 2,446
Desert Storm: 383

First off, according to the VA data, those are the six least costly wars in US history, in terms of loss of soldiers' lives. So a more honest heading would be, "Coronavirus more deadly than the four least costly wars in American history." The Washington Examiner touched on it, but I'm going to expand on this point: America has had a few comparatively low-cost wars in our history. After the Mexican-American War, the costliest war on that list, our next least-costly war was the Korean War, which had more than 36,000 deaths. That is a gap of 23,000 deaths in between our sixth and our seventh least costly wars (according to VA data, which is missing data on two wars less costly than the M-A War; so the actual distinction is between our eight and ninth least costly wars).

The Indian Wars accumulated only about 1,000 deaths over eighty-one years; the Spanish-American war had the Battle of Manila, in which only one American sailor died--from heatstroke, not from battle; and Desert Storm has such astonishingly low US combat deaths that I can't help but imagine it might actually be the lowest-casualty war in history (feel free to prove me wrong, though).

Secondly, many of you read my honest heading and said, "Wait a minute, it's six least costly wars, not four." Others of you probably read the list of casualties and thought, "Hang on--the Mexican-American war alone had more deaths than the coronavirus heading. Something's wrong."

Here's the problem:

"The data does not include other deaths related to the wars".

In other words, they're only counting the deaths of people who died in the middle of a battle, or of wounds sustained in battle. However, there are many other ways for soldiers to die in war than fighting in battle.

The Mexican-American War is the best example of this: of those 13,283 deaths, only 1,733 deaths were in battle. The extra 11,550 deaths were all due to other circumstances related to the war. The Spanish-American War numbers were also conflated: there were 2,061 non-battle deaths and only 385 battle deaths. They even did the same thing to Desert Storm: it was only 148 battle deaths. Add up all the numbers of only battle deaths, and you will definitely get a number lower than 10,000, but you'll be cutting the number of war fatalities, and the severity of war, in half.

But wait--there's more!

What did cause those 11,550 deaths in the Mexican-American War? And those 2,061 deaths in the Spanish-American War?

Diseases.

In the Mexican-American War, the diseases in question were measles and dysentery. William Osler, a doctor in the late 19th century, described dysentery as "more fatal than powder and shot", and approximately 1/8 of the US military in the Mexican-American War died from dysentery.

For the Spanish-American War, in addition to dysentery, there was also malaria and yellow fever. I remember in fifth or sixth grade reading one of those reading-comprehension stories about how one military doctor, Walter Reed, ran a test on volunteer soldiers, who were in Cuba because of the Spanish-American War, to see if yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes, and he proved conclusively that mosquitoes did spread yellow fever (and the comprehension questions were along the lines of, "Was it ethical for him to test on humans, even when they volunteered?").

The VA doesn't break up the numbers for the American Revolution, but the Revolution also had a major disease: smallpox. At one point, George Washington was concerned that smallpox would be a greater threat "than... the Sword of the Enemy".

The concern that diseases are deadlier than enemy fire doesn't just extend to our low-casualty-by-combat wars, either. In the Civil War, the Union (according to the VA) lost 140,414 soldiers in war and 224,097 soldiers to non-battle causes (the Confederates did have more combat fatalities than non-combat fatalities). I'm not sure how many of those non-combat deaths are related to the treatment of combat-sustained wounds (Civil War doctors were notorious for treating wounds by amputation), but the National Library of Medicine says that roughly 2/3 of the deaths in the Civil War, presumably on both sides, were caused by infectious diseases. That means only 1/3 was caused by deaths in combat. (The VA numbers don't support that as a possibility, but I suspect the two different sources are differing over whether someone died after battle, but as a result of a wound sustained in battle, counts as a combat death or not. It is also possible that some soldiers had both battle wounds and diseases, and the dispute arises over whether these deaths are due to the battle wound or to their disease.)

This is all to say that if USA Today's point was that diseases are more deadly than combat, they aren't necessarily wrong. Diseases are often one of the deadliest killers in war (or they used to be--much of what we know about public sanitation and clean food comes from the lessons learned from those wars, which leads me to suspect that the non-combat deaths in WWII had more to do with Japanese POW camps than diseases). But why not just say that? Why not just say, "We should be careful about the Coronavirus because new diseases have historically been deadlier than war"?

To paraphrase one of my friends, "Why would you compare deaths from a disease to deaths from war except by disease?"

One possibility is that the writer of the USA Today piece didn't know about these diseases. However, I don't think that's the case. The article openly said, "The data does not include other deaths related to the wars" (second screenshot). He deliberately left out data to make his headline work. He openly said so. Why? Perhaps because six wars sounds scarier than four wars.

To be fair to USA Today, they did update their headline to be accurate (but still pointless):

But another one of their headlines (different article, different writer) did not get the same update:

That one's actually worse than the original headline.

Then--as if that's not enough--this headline has been spreading!

The Collins dictionary defines scaremongering as "deliberately spreading worrying stories to try and frighten people". This headline surely seems to fit that definition, presumably to get more clicks (hence my screenshots and not links). If nothing else, it's certainly ridiculous sensationalism. And it is spreading.

No, the Coronavirus has not been deadlier than six wars. It has been deadlier than four wars, and those four wars are unusually low-death wars. A typical war is still deadlier than this Coronavirus, by far.

Do not panic.

And whenever you read headlines like this, be skeptical until you know where the numbers come from.