Here is the record of mortality in the U.S. in the 20th Century.
You can see the obvious spike in mortality in 2018, due to the influenza pandemic. Mortality during the Great Depression is choppy, but does generally seem to continue the downward trend seen before the 1918 flu pandemic, before turning down smoothly after 1940. We would not expect to see a large mortality impact in the U.S. due to WWII, as the U.S. had a total of about 400,000 combat and non-combat casualties of the war spread out over 4 years.
I couldn't find a high quality graphic showing global 20th Century death rates, but this is probably good enough.
As you can see, there doesn't seem to be much of a signature of WWII, although again the 1918 flu pandemic is obvious. I know it seems surprising. A total of some 70 to 85 million people are estimated to have perished in WWII, which was about 3% of the global population. However, spread out over 6 years, and against the background of otherwise decreasing mortality, all you really see is a brief bump up in male deaths and then maybe a plateau. Again, the U.S. was not strongly affected. About 0.32% of the U.S. population had deaths ascribed to the war, over the entire period. Countries with very high death rates (e.g. USSR, 13.7%; German, ~18.5%; Poland, ~17%) would undoubtedly have discernible spikes in this graph. On the other hand much of the world, including very populous countries, were less affected or unaffected: India, 0.58%, Indonesia unaffected. Belief it or not, Japanese losses were not nearly comparable to European losses, about 4%; and China even less, at somewhere just north of 3%. (All of this info is accessible on Wikipedia.)
The bottom line is that the secular decline in mortality in the 20th Century was so powerful that even WWII couldn't really slow it down much.
1 comment:
I know you meant 1918, not 2018 :-)
The sharp increase in mortalityin 1918 and just after is remarkable. The back-and-forth mortality rates during the Great Depression make me think that there was in fact instability in the mortality rate because of financial hardships people were enduring. It is also strange that WW II seems to make so little impact on the overall death rate.
It seems to me that the outbreak of COVID-19 is the kind of event that would basically also not show up on a graph of this type, which reinforces your assertion that the reaction to this event's effects on economies will outweigh its actual health impact on populations. Still, the U.S. executive branch's incompetence and spiritual vapidity is beyond disturbing.
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