A Day of Deaths 25 Percent Higher Than Spring’s Worst

Our count of U.S. COVID-19 deaths currently stands at 298,823, and will almost certainly reach 300,000 this week. It’s worth noting that from March through early November, when official COVID-19 deaths remained well under 250,000, at least 350,000 more people died than usual in the United States. A quarter of those “excess deaths” were officially attributed to causes other than COVID-19, but may actually have been due to the virus. The New York Times offers a close look at where deaths are above normal in the United States.

These COVID-19 deaths haven’t affected all Americans equally. As of this week, U.S. states report that more than 50,000 Black people have died of COVID-19. As stark as this number is, it’s also an undercount, in part because for more than 20,000 U.S. COVID-19 deaths reported to date, no racial or ethnic demographic data were reported. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the data have shown that Black people have been much more likely to die than white people in the same jurisdiction. In Washington, D.C., where the known disparity is the most extreme, Black residents have been more than six times as likely to die from COVID-19 as white residents. Nationwide, if these disparities did not exist—if Black people were only as likely to die of COVID-19 as white people are—more than 22,000 Black Americans would still be alive.

At the national level, the good news this week is that cases haven’t risen that much above last week’s big increases—but at the regional level, the story is more complex. Before Thanksgiving, we predicted that case, test, and death reporting would be compromised by the holiday, first dropping during and immediately after the holiday weekend, and then rising sharply as backlogs resolved. We think tests and cases have now largely recovered from this period of erratic reporting.

Death reporting is a complex—and much lengthier—process that often results in backlogs that are opaque to members of the public, and it’s less clear that the death-reporting backlogs related to the holiday have been completely resolved. With Christmas a little over a week away and New Year’s Day a week after that, we are now heading into a doubly disruptive period in COVID-19 data. The actual patterns present in cases and deaths will eventually become clear when complete reporting by symptom onset and date of death becomes available from federal data sources, but through mid-January at least, we should view the daily and weekly movements in the data with extra caution. We also strongly recommend not relying on test-positivity calculations during this period, when reported cases and reported tests are likely to be even less synchronized than they usually are.

Hospitalizations remain the sturdiest metric through periods of reporting disruption. States reported that a little over 113,000 people were in the hospital with COVID-19 yesterday. For comparison, hospitalizations in the spring and summer surges peaked at just under 60,000 people. Regionally, hospitalizations are continuing to decline in the Midwest, but they’re rising everywhere else in the country. If current hospitalization trends continue, the Northeast’s rising numbers will soon cross the Midwest’s declining ones.