SAY
Deaths in the US from COVID-19 reach 1 million
DETAILS
Accurate: The claim accurately covered US death counts by US state health agencies as well as the CDC. The official count of deaths from COVID-19 reached the 1 million mark in mid-May 2022.
KEY TO TAKE
COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020. More than two years later, the disease has caused about 1 million deaths in the US and an estimated 15 million excess deaths worldwide, according to agencies of health.
COMPLETE CLAIM: Deaths in the US from COVID-19 reach 1 million
china officially reported its first death from COVID-19 on January 11, 2020. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) characterized COVID-19 as pandemic, which is the global spread of a disease. Since then, the disease has swept the world, causing an estimated excess of 15 million deaths worldwide compared to expected mortality, according to the WHO.
In late May 2022, approximately 29 months after the first officially recorded COVID-19 deaths in the US, various news points of sale reported that the death toll from COVID-19 in the US reached the one million death mark. Official mortality data confirmed these statements to be accurate, as detailed below.
The Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus COVID Resource Center, which compiles US state mortality data, reported 999,842 COVID-19 deaths as of May 17, 2022. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID Data Tracker. mentioned 997,215 COVID-19 deaths as of May 16, 2022. Figure 1 illustrates the increase in COVID-19 mortality over time in the US, as reported in the CDC COVID Data Tracker.
Figure 1. Cumulative number of deaths from COVID-19 in the US over time to May 16, 2022. Source: CDC COVID Data Tracker
The CDC provides another death count, managed by its National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The NCHS death count is updated weekly and is based on analysis of death certificates, as explained earlier in Health Feedback. This process is slower than that used in the COVID Data Tracker which is updated daily, but provides more accurate numbers. In its latest update on May 16, 2022, the NCHS reported that deaths from COVID-19 reached 1,000,292.
The number of deaths from a pandemic in a given country is influenced by the size of its population: the larger the population, the more people are expected to become infected and die. However, the US is one of the most affected countries in the world, even after taking into account the size of its population. In fact, the US ranks second in the COVID-19 mortality rate, the number of COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 population, just after Brazil and before Greece, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center (Figure 2), though the accuracy of death reports may vary with the reliability of each country’s health statistics.
Figure 2. Ranking of countries by mortality rate from COVID-19. Source: Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.
In short, the claim that COVID-19 caused about a million deaths in the US in May 2022 is accurate.
Reference-healthfeedback.org