It's visible now, so your vouching worked. It seems obvious to me GP is writing about COVID-19. The US CDC lists estimated US deaths from COVID at currently 1,153,910.

But we've had plenty of other examples in living memory, with influenza currently averaging about a million deaths in the US every 30 years.

Yeah, I'm aware. Happens to all my comments.

And as the other poster correctly guesses, this was a sarcastic reference to covid.