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In a May 2020 address to the United States Studies Centre (USSC), former US Ambassador to Australia John Berry offered a snapshot into the painful reality of the COVID pandemic as it was unfolding in New York. Putting the scale of COVID deaths in the United States into context, Ambassador Berry explained, “if you take all the people who have died at Antietam – US citizens – all the Americans killed at Pearl Harbor, all the Americans killed at Guadalcanal, at Iwo Jima, at Normandy, the entire Iraq War, the entire Afghanistan War, that totals just over 28,000 people, putting all of those together. You would have to multiply that by greater than two – more than two – to achieve the amount of people who have died in the last six weeks in the United States of America. 60,000 almost 62,000 estimated today.”