800,000 People in the United States Have Died of COVID-19

Some experts suspect the real toll is closer to 1 million.

An art installation no the National Mall commemorating all Americans who have died of COVID-19 on September 24, 2021. Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency/Getty

The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.

When the United States hit 100,000 COVID-19 deaths in May of 2020, it was a pretty big deal. The New York Times mourned the “incalculable loss” in a full page headline. Even Donald Trump grudgingly acknowledged the toll.

On Sunday, with far less fanfare, the US hit 800,000 COVID deaths, according to a Reuters tally. That appalling milestone comes with deaths and cases again rising amid cold weather and continued vaccine refusal, and with the highly transmissible Omicron variant poised to contribute to the surge.

Eight hundred thousand is roughly the same as the number of Rwandans estimated to have been killed in the 1994 genocide there. It’s more than the population of North Dakota. Worldwide, meanwhile, COVID has killed at least 5.3 million people, according to a New York Times estimate. The real number is probably much higher.

Official COVID deaths, those that hospitals or coroners say were caused by the virus, will pass one million next year, maybe in the spring at current rates. But public health experts argue that COVID’s actual toll has already reached that grim milestone. Measures of excess mortality, a measurement of deaths from all causes above the number public health experts expected, jumped in many US communities as COVID surged. These measures suggest the actual death toll is about 20 percent higher than the official tally. Some of those added deaths aren’t from COVID—they could be people who failed to get medical treatment due to hospitals being overwhelmed. But these are real losses linked to the pandemic.

And the deaths are concentrated among people of color. They surged “in place like Albuquerque, New Mexico; Miami-Dade County, Florida; Jersey City, New Jersey; and New York City,” researchers from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and MuckRock’s Documenting COVID-19 project wrote last week. 

If you count those people, “the number of Americans who have died from the virus could be closer to 1 million,” the researchers wrote.

Deaths mount while the Republican Party makes resistance to vaccine mandates a key plank ahead of what are expected to be big gains in the 2022 midterm elections. On December 8, every Senate Republican, along with two Democrats, voted to overturn President Joe Biden’s proposed mandate for large private companies to require workers to either get vaccinated or to undergo regular COVID testing.

Around 60 million adults older than 12 in the US remain unvaccinated. Those people face a far greater risk of serious illness or death from the disease. A Texas study found last month that unvaccinated people are 13 times more likely to get COVID and 40 times more likely to die of it compared to those who are vaccinated.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate