Also note that COVID has killed more people than combat deaths in all U.S. wars combined. U.S. COVID death toll is now 826K, combat death toll for major U.S. wars is a total of 666K: 291K for WW2, 214K for the Civil War, 53K for WW1, 47K for Vietnam, 33K for Korea, and then numbers start getting negligible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

It's also passed the death toll in the U.S. from the Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed about 675K (although this was out of a smaller total population).

It doesn't take a very large death toll to have a major impact on American society.