Diseases That Have Caused Mass Deaths in America

Pandemics: what are they and can they be stopped?

2:56

(CNN) -

More than 675,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University.

With that number, he has surpassed the number of deaths caused by the 1918 flu pandemic.

Covid-19 is now the deadliest epidemic to ever hit the United States, also surpassing combined US military deaths in WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf Wars. and the War in Afghanistan.

According to a study published by the Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March, covid-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States last year, behind heart disease and cancer. .

The death rate increased by 15.9% from 2019 to 2020 in the United States.

But Covid-19 is not the only disease to hit the United States in recent history.

These are some of the diseases, viruses and epidemics that have also left a large number of deaths:

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Influenza

The 1918 pandemic occurred in three waves, from the spring of 1918 to the winter of 1919, ultimately killing between 50 and 100 million people worldwide.

Among them were 675,000 Americans.

The first wave of the spring of 1918 was relatively mild.

Most of the 1918 flu deaths occurred in the fall of that year, the second and worst wave of that illness.

H1N1 flu

The global H1N1 flu pandemic in 2010 may have killed as many as 575,000 people, although only 18,500 deaths were confirmed.

The H1N1 virus is a type of swine flu, which is a respiratory disease of pigs caused by the type A influenza virus. In the United States, an estimated 12,469 people died from this virus.

Cancer and heart disease

The study the CDC released in March found other diseases that cause large numbers of deaths in the United States.

According to that report, data last year showed that heart disease caused 690,882 deaths and cancer caused 598,932 deaths.

Those were the two leading causes of death in 2020. Third was covid-19.

And then it was followed by involuntary injuries, stroke, chronic lower respiratory disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, and kidney disease.

These are preliminary data so the figures and mortality rates may change as additional information is received.

Because the investigation of causes of death takes time, the final information for a given year is usually published approximately 11 months after the end of the calendar year.

Addiction to opioids and other drugs

In 2017, then-United States President Donald Trump declared the opioid epidemic a national public health emergency.

Between 1999 and 2019, more than 247,000 people died in the United States from prescription opioid overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2019 alone, nearly 50,000 Americans died from overdoses of powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl.

Meanwhile, more than 93,000 people died from a drug overdose last year, according to provisional data from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.

This means that 2020 was the deadliest year on record for drug overdoses.

With information from CNN's Holly Yan, Dan Merica, Stephen Collinson and Kristen Rogers.

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