Fig. 4.

Mortality of COVID-19 scenario compared to past US epidemics according to different measures. In the scenario of 1 million COVID-19 deaths, the virus kills more Americans than past epidemics, but when population size is accounted for, Spanish flu is more deadly. Taking into account years of remaining life, we calculate that the Spanish flu resulted in even larger losses. The scales of the HIV and opioid epidemics were much smaller each year, but over decades became comparable to COVID-10 in terms of per-capita deaths and to Spanish flu in terms of life years lost. The scenario of 250,000 COVID-19 deaths is also shown with a dashed line. (Source: our calculations detailed in Materials and Methods.)