Ten Deadliest Days in U.S. History? The Meme Making the Rounds Is Wrong

A recent meme making the rounds on social media purports to list the 10 deadliest days in U.S. history and lists several recent days among the top 10. See the graph below.

It does not take much fact-checking to find that while the absolute numbers on the list are about right (estimates for deaths due to the Galveston hurricane range from 6,000 to 12,000), there are several things wrong with the list. One is the glaring omission of the Spanish flu pandemic. At it’s peak in October 1918, 195,000 Americans are estimated to have died from this deadly strain of influenza. That’s an average of 6,290 deaths per day that month. That is much worse than the single day peaks experienced so far for COVID-19.

A second glaring gap are the high amounts of single day deaths in Spring 2020 due to COVID-19. Through the first eight days of December, the single deadliest day is 2,733 on December 2nd (different sources have slightly different numbers – I’m using the COVID Tracking Project data for this post). That is still slightly less than the single day peak this year on May 7th, when 2,769 people died from COVID-19.

Third, the list leaves off several events where thousands died, including the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, two hurricanes in Puerto Rico (including one from 2017!), and the Okeechobee Hurricane that hit Florida in 1928. The list also leaves off events that occurred outside the U.S. but where thousands of Americans died – notably D-Day in 1944 during World War 2.

A fourth issue is that the United States population has tripled since 1900, so these comparisons across time are not comparing apples-to-apples.

I could not find daily U.S. mortality data for the Spanish flu, but the relative rankings of the other events are shown below. The disturbing thing is that deaths from COVID-19 are currently hitting peaks not seen since last Spring, and may soon surpass them. Most of the data is collected from Wikipedia.