Health officials and President Donald Trump unveiled mind-numbing statistics this week that should shock and concern every one of us.

In a worst-case scenario, the COVID-19 pandemic that is sweeping the globe could cause up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States alone. Even in a best-case scenario, which most health professionals view as improbable given the casualness with which some Americans are taking directives to social distance and observing other protocols, we are likely to see 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in our country.

We have not seen a pandemic of this scope in more than a century. The 1918-19 influenza pandemic (known as the Spanish Flu) was until now the most severe in modern history. It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin.

In the United States, it was first identified in military personnel in the spring of 1918. It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. Back then, however, the U.S. population was just 103 million compared to today’s 330 million.

Although it was widely known as the “Spanish Flu,” it likely had its origins elsewhere. In its initial stages, western governments, including the United States, had an understanding with the news media to underplay the scope of the virus so as not to panic the population. In Spain, a neutral country that had no such agreement with its media outlets, the story was splashed across the front pages of its newspapers.

Both of my parents were affected by the 1918 pandemic. Before they met each other in Bethlehem, my father, Phillip, who later opened a grocery store in Summit Hill, became seriously ill when he contracted the flu while working in a steel mill in Pittsburgh. Although many of his infected co-workers later died, my father made a full recovery.

My mother, Frieda, grandmother and three uncles, who came to the United States from Italy in 1919 aboard the ship America, were quarantined at Ellis Island for a week after the ship docked, because hundreds of other passengers had contracted the flu and some died. Luckily, my mother and her family were not infected.

If worst-case scenarios are borne out with the COVID-19 pandemic, our deaths could exceed that of the previously worst known pandemic to mankind - the Black Death (bubonic plague) of the Middle Ages.

Our American hubris convinced us that a catastrophe of this scope and magnitude could never happen to us - not in 2020, not in the richest country in the world, not in a nation that is used to viewing itself as #1.

A few weeks ago, we viewed with horror how the coronavirus had overwhelmed the northern part of Italy, then spread to the rest of the country. Italian epidemiologists warned us that we would soon see here what we were seeing then in Italy.

We scoffed at the notion. No way. We had this under control. After all, President Donald Trump assured us it was. In February, the president constantly downplayed the threat and contradicted his own health officials, asserting that the virus was “very much under control” and infections were “going very substantially down, not up.” On Feb. 26, he proclaimed that total cases will be “close to zero.”

Now, five weeks later, we know the reality of the situation. Each day, we get more and more somber statistics about the numbers infected and how many died. It reminds us of the daily body count we received during the Vietnam War.

Despite Trump’s comparing COVID-19 to the ordinary flu and saying for weeks that it would pass, he said just this week that he understood all along that it could be a killer of historic proportions. “I thought it could be,” he said. “I knew everything. I knew it could be horrible, and I knew it could be maybe good.”

He implied that he misled us because he wanted to downplay the seriousness of the threat; he wanted to give us hope. “You know, I’m a cheerleader for the country,” he told us.

Most of us have seen the unsettling scenes of the bread lines of the Great Depression in the late 1920s and 1930s. We shook our heads and patted ourselves on the back saying we would never see scenes like that again. That was ancient history.

We are seeing more and more lines of vehicles at food banks and other food-distribution sites as more than 1 million Pennsylvanians and more than 6 million nationwide without jobs try to get the necessities of life.

Thanks to a $2.2 trillion stimulus package passed by Congress and signed by the president, help is on the way, but will it be enough or is it just a temporary patch on a massive wound?

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com