COVID: Just Some Numbers

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) website provides a plethora of data related to all things COVID-19. Given the ongoing politicization of the pandemic, this article is intended to simply presents digestible CDC numbers that might be of interest to ordinary Americans.

Between January 1 2020 and November 17 2021, a total of 6,222,238 Americans died from ALL causes including 765,320 (12.3%) whose deaths were attributed to COVID.

Editor: It can take several weeks for death records to be submitted to the National Center for Health Statistics so it will take a while for the final numbers through November 17 to be fully tabulated but let’s run with these numbers in the interim.

For the years 2016 to 2019, an average of 258,272 Americans died from a variety of causes each month. During 2020, the monthly average number of deaths increased to 315,742 because of COVID, a 122.25% increase.

Almost as many COVID deaths have been recorded so far in 2021 as in all of 2020.

Using the 2020 Census U.S. population number of 328,239,523, the 765,320 Americans who have died from COVID represent 0.2335% of the population. This means that even though 146.6 million Americans have tested positive for COVID, 99.7665% of the population has survived COVID.

The average American has been eight times more likely to die from an accident or a disease other than COVID since January 2020.

Older populations are always most at risk. Those over the age of 65 account for 75.14% of all COVID related deaths and 72.96% of all non-COVID related deaths, highlighting the fact that older Americans have disproportionately been impacted by COVID.?

At the other end of the scale, a total of 62,226 young Americans aged 17 and younger have died from all causes since January 2020, including 605 whose deaths have been attributed to COVID.

Even though very few COVID deaths have been recorded for young Americans, more than twice as many have died from COVID in 2021 than in all of 2020.

Using the 2020 Census U.S. population number for those aged 17 and younger of 73,579,055, the national COVID death rate for young Americans is 0.0008%. This means the survival rate is 99.9992%.

A young person was 103 times more likely to die from an accident or a disease other than COVID since January 2020.

There is a birth every 8 seconds and a death every 11 seconds in the United States. Even with COVID, the sun still comes up every morning.