How many people have died of COVID so far? The numbers vary a bit (not too much) depending on where you look:
The New York Times reports 1,003,167 Americans.
Johns Hopkins reports 1,004,733 Americans.
Worldometer reports 1,031,273 Americans.
The CDC reports 1,001,313 Americans.
But, we know that the number of true COVID deaths is higher than reported for a variety of reasons: fewer primary care physicians, less access to health insurance, more people dying at home, and political motivations. Estimates of undercounting range from 20% to 36% (see here, here, and here). Taking an average of the number of deaths listed above (1,010,122), we can calculate that the true number of COVID deaths is somewhere between 1,262,653 and 1,578,316 Americans. If we go with the halfway point, that would be 1,420,484 Americans.
There is an alternative to complex statistical analyses that we plebes can use to get a sense of the number of unreported deaths. We just download and use the data on weekly reported deaths per year. Most, if not all states, have statutes making it illegal to NOT report a death (something about the improper handling of a corpse). So, almost all deaths are reported to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.
This is a graph of the weekly deaths for the years 2015 to 2019. You can see that the number of deaths per week each year doesn’t change much. The lines overlay pretty well. The black line is an average of those years.
So, what do deaths during the years 2020 — 2022 (current) look like when plotted over the 2015 — 2019 average? Quite striking. Don’t forget that the number of deaths for the years from 2020 — 2022 includes deaths from other causes—the background death number if you will.
So, let’s make a “daisy chain” of the 2020-2022 data so that we see the entire 2½ years in one go, and do the same with the average death data from 2015 — 2019 (it’s ok, the average background death number probably won’t change much). Again, the numbers for the deaths from 2020 — 2022 INCLUDE the background death numbers (deaths from other causes).
Because the numbers for the deaths from 2020 — 2022 include the background death numbers (the black line from above), we can subtract the background death numbers from the numbers in the 2020-2022 red line to get a net number of deaths due to “some other cause” outside of all other causes. Doing that and laying the resulting graph over the graph of US Covid deaths from Worldometer (the pale graph) shows just how well one tracks with the other (you could use the NYTimes death graph but the format sucks). The consistency between the two graphs appears to confirm that all those extra deaths resulted from COVID.
Ah. So now the pièce de résistance. If I added up all the net deaths per week for the entire 2½ years illustrated in the above graph, how many COVID deaths are there?
I get 1,428,767 Americans dead from COVID.
It’s a simple calculation based on real data that is required to be reported (even in FL).
It’s an awful number.