A by-the-numbers look at how Covid-19 has impacted the United States.
A ccording to official estimates from the CDC, Johns Hopkins University and other organizations that collect public health data, the United States is nearing the grim milestone of one million deaths from Covid-19. Since February 2020, Covid-19 has been listed as the underlying cause of death on at least 90% of these death certificates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This means the disease “initiated the train of events leading directly to death.” For the remainder, Covid-19 contributed to death but was not the underlying cause. For two years running, Covid-19 has killed more Americans than almost anything else. Around 462,000 Americans died from the disease in 2021 and 386,000 did in 2020, according to the CDC, accounting for 13.3% and 10.4% of all deaths, respectively. Only heart disease and cancer—sweeping terms that cover many distinct diseases—killed more. More than 150,000 people have already died from Covid-19 in 2022, a figure that would easily rank it among the top ten leading causes of death in recent years. Despite frequent comparisons to the flu in order to downplay the threat of the pandemic—including many by former President Donald Trump—Covid-19 has already killed nearly three times more people in a little over two years than flu does in a decade. According to the CDC, seasonal influenza killed roughly 360,000 people in the U.S. between 2010 and 2020. Covid-19 has killed more Americans than HIV has in the last four decades and nearly twice the number killed in both world wars. Covid-19 is not far from having killed as many Americans as every U.S. war between 1775 and 1991—nearly 1.2 million people—according to data from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Covid-19 has killed nearly double the population of Wyoming—around 577,000—according to the latest census data. It has also killed more than the number of people living in five other states and Washington, D.C.: Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Delaware. The U.S. death toll far exceeds the official tally of any other country. It is followed by Brazil, India and Russia, which have reported around 664,000,524,000 and 369,000 deaths, according to data collated by Johns Hopkins University. A lack of testing capacity, political incentives to undercount and poor record keeping in some countries mean official figures may undersell the actual number of Covid-19 deaths. Experts believe official counts for India and Russia capture just a fraction of deaths from Covid-19, for example. Accounting for population, the U.S. ranks 18th in the world, according to Johns Hopkins University data, behind Peru, Poland, Hungary and Brazil. For every 100,000 Americans, roughly 302 have died from Covid-19, the data shows, higher than other affluent countries. In the U.K. and France, both wealthy nations hit hard by the virus, this figure is around 259 and 226 deaths per 100,000 people, respectively. For Australia, fewer than 29 people in every 100,000 died, with even fewer in Japan and New Zealand, respectively 23 and 15 per 100,000 people. The true death toll of Covid-19 in the U.S. is likely much higher than official figures suggest. Some deaths from Covid-19 are not counted as they can happen months after infection, others are documented as being caused by conditions with similar symptoms and others are caused by knock-on effects of the pandemic, such as an inability to seek treatment for another condition. The fragmented nature of the American healthcare system, different reporting standards in different jurisdictions and overwhelmed hospital systems exacerbated this.
