Mortality rates in the 20th Century

Regarding DQ ' s query in the comments to the previous post:Here is the record of mortality in the U.S. in the 20th Century.You can see the obvious spike in mortality in 2018, due to the influenza pandemic. Mortality during the Great Depression is choppy, but does generally seem to continue the downward trend seen before the 1918 flu pandemic, before turning down smoothly after 1940. We would not expect to see a large mortality impact in the U.S. due to WWII, as the U.S. had a total of about 400,000 combat and non-combat casualties of the war spread out over 4 years.I couldn ' t find a high quality graphic showing global 20th Century death rates, but this is probably good enough.As you can see, there doesn ' t seem to be much of a signature of WWII, although again the 1918 flu pandemic is obvious. I know it seems surprising. A total of some 70 to 85 million people are estimated to have perished in WWII, which was about 3% of the global population. However, spread out over 6 years, and against the background of otherwise decreasing mortality, all you really see is a brief bump up in male deaths and then maybe a plateau. Again, the U.S. was not strongly affected. About 0.32% of the U.S. population had deaths ascribed to the war, over the entire period. Countries with very high death rates (e.g. USSR, 13.7%; German, ~18.5%; Poland, ~17%) would undoubtedly have discernible spikes in this graph. On the other hand much of the world, including very populous countries, were less affe...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs