There's a meme going around

I saw a slightly-inaccurate version of this on Facebook and corrected it.

Here's a list of the most single day, single cause deaths in American history, through yesterday. See if you can spot the pattern:

1. Galveston hurricane, 9 Sep 1900 (~6,000)
2. Battle of Antietam, 18 Sep 1862 (3,652)
3. Puerto Rico hurricane, 7 Aug 1899 (3,389)
4. SF earthquake, 18 Apr 1906 (~3,100)
5. Terrorist attacks, 11 Sep 2001 (2,996)
6. Covid-19, 3 Dec 2020 (2,861)
7. Okeechobee hurricane, 17 Sep 1928 (~2,800)
8. Covid-19, 2 Dec 2020 (2,762)
9. Covid-19, 8 Dec 2020 (2,566)
10. Pearl Harbor, 7 Dec 1941 (2,467)
11. Covid-19, 1 Dec 2020 (2,461)
12. Covid-19, 4 Dec 2020 (2,439)
13. Covid-19, 5 Dec 2020 (2,310)

More important is that the only disaster to kill more Americans on an annualized basis than Covid-19 is the 1918-1919 flu, and it's a very close number (about 300,000 deaths per year attributable to each). As the winter goes on and Covid-19 deaths increase, I expect it will surpass the 1918 flu on that basis.

But no disaster has killed more Americans than HIV/AIDS, except smallpox, depending on when you start counting.

Data from CDC.