The table above is a series of WAG's (Wild Assed Guesses), comparing our chances as MPHS Classmates dying in Vietnam and our chances of dying from Covid-19 - so far - 50 some years later. And it is a WAG so don't get too excited about the numbers. I did not spend too much time on them so do not want to be tested. Close enough for non government work.
It is a weird comparison, of interest only to us MPHS mid-60's classes. But I thought you might be interested.
We lost 12 of our classmates in Vietnam. We also lost our ROTC Instructor and there were surely guys who died that we never heard about but we will work with this number. Our heroes we lost are remembered and honored on http://empehiheroes.blogspot.com/
The men who died were born from 1944 to 1950. I calculated very roughly how many boys were in those seven classes, which totalled 1781. I just did this by counting all the photos from the 1966 annual and divided in half for girls and boys and multiplied that by seven years - it is likely the true total is a little different but this is close enough for a WAG.
This resulted in a chance of death for an MPHS guy of about 1 out of 150 and of course went from zero to much higher depending on whether he served and whether he went to Vietnam and whether he was in a high risk job. We did not know the chance of death at the time of course but we were very aware that it was very hazardous.
I then calculated how many total MPHS classmates we had - males and females, and then guessed at a mortality of around 70%, and came up with a total of 2,315 MPHS Classmates around for Covid for those same seven years.
A few days ago our USA Covid-19 death total was 120,000 on a population of 330,000,000, so a death rate of 1 out of 2,750 for our national population. Using that number our expected death of our MPHS classmates from those seven years would be close to but less than one. Close enough to one.
So, our chances of getting killed in Vietnam were much higher than our chances of dying from Covid-19. Of course the book is closed on Vietnam where we are just beginning with Covid-19. We won't know the total for quite some time and it could become much higher. We all hope it won't.
Does anyone know of any classmate who has died from Covid-19? We would expect one poor soul based on these WAG calcs. And we collectively know only a small subset of our classmates from this seven year period.
Incidentally, I also did a WAG on the chances of a Marine getting killed in Vietnam. About 1 in 20 so a bit higher. My boot camp platoon in 1967 was 1 in 10, while my OCS Company in 1969 was only about 1 in 20. It would have been much higher in 1967 or 1968 so for me fortunate that I did not get through OCS and to Vietnam until late 1969. Joining the Marines was not the safest thing to do.
