GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. — Every day, we receive and report a number, the number of people who died the day before due to this awful pandemic.
With every number is a name, a face, a human life lost.
It’s that part where the numbers cannot do justice, but numbers can offer at least some perspective on this atrocity.
To date, according to the Minnesota Department of Health, 2,754 people have been killed by this disease in Minnesota in less than 8 months.
That's almost 1,000 more people than have died from the flu in this state over the last ten years, combined (1.852).
That’s more than the number of Minnesotan military casualties during the entire Vietnam War (1,077), almost three times over.
During the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic, 63 Minnesotans died from it. We nearly lost that many people to COVID-19 on Wednesday (56).
We’ve almost lost as many Minnesotans to COVID-19 as all the people killed by the terrorist attacks on 9/11 (2,977).
Remember the I-35W Bridge collapse? That horrible accident killed 13 people. In the last week, Minnesota averaged 32 deaths per day from the novel coronavirus.
Yes, the death rate is about 1.4 percent, meaning 98.6 percent of people who get the disease will survive.
By the numbers, the older you are, the greater the danger, along with other immunocompromising factors. These are the death rates by age for COVID patients in Minnesota, according to MDH.
- 20s: .01%
- 30s: .06%
- 40s: .14%
- 50s: .52%
- 60s: 1.8%
- 70s: 6%
- 80s: 16.7%
- 90s: 28.6%
- 100s: 37.3%
To date, only 3.5% percent of Minnesotans have tested positive for the virus. Health officials say they do not know how many people may have had the virus and not been tested. A CDC study estimated that ten times as many people may have been infected than the number of confirmed cases this summer.