What really boggles my mind is to consider the next "milestone". The US lost 116,516 in WW1. We're probably less than 2 weeks from reaching that on paper, and probably past that in blood.

We passed 9/11 (on paper) on Mar 28. We passed Vietnam (on paper) on April 20. We're now passing WW1. This is the true scale that's completely evading our imaginations.

Following World War I the Spanish (lol) Flu killed almost 700,000 in the US.

It’s somewhere around 400k for ww2. I’m really hoping these numbers don’t become relevant. I was simply trying to make unimaginable numbers, imaginable.

I don't know that they're unimaginable. Right now the death count is about 1.25 times the death count for the 2017-2018 flu season. At any rate it fits within a context of many other illnesses and pandemics, and it makes much more sense to compare this virus to those rather than deaths from war (though there are discussions you could have about the direct relationship between the two in specific cases).

I'm not saying that you're doing so here, but evoking the language of war is a common rhetorical tactic. When you compare the deaths from this disease to wartime casualties it causes people to analyze them in similar ways, when the two have mostly non-overlapping causes, remedies, and knock-on effects. I actually believe that's what the New York Times is attempting to do with today's front page, and I think it's something to be avoided.

Edit: disregard if this turns out to be a bioweapon