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• 1 2023-06-20T19:17:51-04:00 What is it like to have 30,000 excess deaths per day? 10 Such a staggering number is hard to imagine, but the COVID pandemic can give us at least some sense of scale. plain 2023-06-22T10:33:30-04:00 Recent demographic analyses have suggested that the daily rate of excess mortality at the height of the Holodomor approached 30,000. It's very hard to translate that number into what it might have meant for the people who actually lived through the horror. However, the recent COVID-19 pandemic gives us at least a tiny inkling of what it might have been like.
  
  Immediately after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, news stories explaining Ukraine's geographic size would often say that it is "slightly smaller than Texas". While the Ukrainian SSR in 1930 was a bit smaller than present-day Ukraine, the comparison is still reasonable. Furthermore, Texas in 2020 and the Ukrainian SSR in 1930 had remarkably similar populations of approximately 30 million. This allows us to directly compare absolute mortality numbers.
  
  According to the CDC, Texas experienced several waves of excess mortality between July 2020 and April 2022. The peak of the largest of those waves occurred in the week ending January 16, 2021, when there were over 7,000 deaths, compared to an expected number of deaths of approximately 4,000. Thus, there were approximately 3,000 excess deaths in that week, or (on average) about 400 per day.
  
  The difference between 400 and 30,000 is hard to wrap one's head around. Numerically, it would seem that the Holodomor was more than 70 times worse than COVID-19, though it is not clear what that even means. We remember the impact that the coronavirus had on the United States, and that allows us to imagine how the impact of the Holodomor on Ukraine would have been indescribably worse.