The US passed one million Covid deaths last week. That’s quite an achievement, but we’re not resting on our laurels!

 

The US passed the figure of one million Covid-19 deaths last week. I should point out that this is based on the numbers published by Worldometers.info, whose numbers I’ve been using since I started writing these posts in mid-March 2020. The Johns Hopkins site says 978,648 as of today (March 30). The JH deaths figure has been consistently lower than Worldometers since early in the pandemic, when I know that the numbers were constantly being revised, even for past weeks. I suppose that, during all those revisions, the two sources diverged, since the difference between them has stayed relatively constant since then.

One cause of the divergence was probably due to the New York City wave in April 2020, when a lot of people died at home of what was clearly Covid. They died at home despite the EMTs having been called, since the EMTs were given the unimaginably terrible responsibility of not taking anybody to the hospital who would probably just take up a bed for a day or two before dying (and of course, there were very few ventilators. Remember the ventilators?). And since tests were in very short supply then, the EMTs didn’t even test the people they were leaving to die. There were thousands of people who died that way, and I know there was a lot of controversy over how to adjust the death numbers to account for them.

Of course, I want to congratulate Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis, Ron Paul, and all the other politicians who worked tirelessly to get us to the one million deaths mark. We couldn’t have done it without you!

And I also want to express my gratitude that some of these politicians, as well as a host of other people from all walks of life, are keeping up their good work now, in making sure that the US doesn’t have its defenses up as the BA.2 wave hits us. Republicans blocked the $16 billion or so in Covid funds that were put into the bill to keep the government functioning about six weeks ago. Those funds would have gone toward getting more testing sites available, etc. Of course, we don’t need that anymore, since omicron was the last wave, right?

Wrong. The BA.2 subvariant of omicron (although it seems the fact that it’s technically a subvariant means nothing. It’s quite different from omicron and – of course – more transmissible) is already the number one cause of Covid in the US. And new deaths last week jumped by the highest percentage over the previous week (55%), since I moved to weekly tracking more than a year ago.

Plus, I heard today (yesterday?) that governors of over 20 states are suing the Biden administration to lift the mask requirement in planes. This at a time when we’re now losing the equivalent of three jumbo jets of people every day. If we can’t kill them through actual crashes, we’ll do it through the numerical equivalent! In June 2020, I wondered why we were so willing to accept people dying of covid, when we would never stand for multiple plane crashes every year, let alone every day. I’ll note that, when I wrote that post, we were at 800-850 deaths per day. Now we’re at 950 a day and heading back upward. And we’ve just passed the equivalent of about 3,300 jumbo jet crashes during the pandemic.

We’re clearly not anywhere near done yet…

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, March 27.

Month	Deaths reported during month/year	Avg. deaths per day during month/year	Deaths as percentage of previous month/year
Month of March 2020	4,058	131
Month of April	59,812	1,994	1,474%
Month of May	42,327	1,365	71%
Month of June	23,925	798	57%
Month of July	26,649	860	111%
Month of August	30,970	999	116%
Month of Sept.	22,809	760	75%
Month of Oct.	24,332	785	107%
Month of Nov.	38,293	1,276	157%
Month of Dec.	79,850	2,576	209%
Total 2020	354,215	1,154
Month of Jan. 2021	98,604	3,181	119%
Month of Feb.	68,918	2,461	70%
Month of March	37,945	1,224	55%
Month of April	24,323	811	64%
Month of May	19,843	661	82%
Month of June	10,544	351	53%
Month of July	8,833	287	84%
Month of August	31,160	1,005	351%
Month of Sept.	56,687	1,890	182%
Month of Oct.	49,992	1,613	88%
Month of Nov.	38,364	1,279	77%
Month of Dec.	41,452	1,337	108%
Total 2021	492,756	1,350	158%
Month of Jan. 2022	65,855	2,124	159%
Month of Feb. 2022	63,451	2,266	96%
Total Pandemic so far	1,004,340	1,356

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 1,004,340

Average daily deaths last seven days: 915

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 589

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.6%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 81,645,422

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 235,321 (33,617/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 235,424 (33,632/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.3% (0.3% last week)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.