Posted By: Francis Koster Published: August 6, 2020

The Uncounted

We are at war with COVID-19.  What is surprising is that the casualty reports are leaving an entire group out.  When we talk about the war on COVID-19, the casualty reports talk about “infected”, “deaths” and “recovered” – but no “wounded”.   Think back to how the casualties of war are stated. In the Vietnam War, there were 3.4 million United States military in Southeast Asia.  47,434 died in combat, and 303,644 were wounded ⁽¹⁾.  In many cases those that were wounded lost arms or legs, or suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and endured lifelong health issues.  To this day the publicly available websites all show them as having been wounded. The same is not true when recording casualties in our war with COVID-19.   As crazy as it sounds, once a patient who was infected with COVID-19 and is added to the state and national data bases, they are automatically moved to the “recovered” column within a month ⁽²⁾. This is terribly misleading to the American public as they try to plan ahead.