500,000
lives lost
The scale of the COVID-19 death toll in the United States
As the trickle of fatalities increased, state agencies scrambled to track deaths with varying degrees of delay. The data below reflects deaths on the date reported, and not necessarily the day someone died.
About the data
Reuters collates and checks this data by hand, and the figures largely come from state, county and territory government/public health department websites. Deaths include both confirmed and probable cases.
Some sudden spikes in recorded deaths are due to reporting backlogs. For example, a spike in late June 2020 is due to New Jersey including over 1,800 probable deaths from earlier in the pandemic. Similar spikes occurred in February 2021 as Indiana and Ohio reported deaths that had occurred earlier in the pandemic.
Reporting by Emily Isaacman, Arundhati Sarkar, Yajush Gupta, Sabahatjahan Contractor, Chinmay Rautmare, Roshan Abraham, Lisa Shumaker, Christine Chan, Wen Foo, Aditya Munjuluru, Anurag Maan, Nikhil Subba, K. Sathya Narayanan, Ahmed Farhatha, Aniruddha Chakrabarty, Mrinalika Roy, Abhishek Manikandan, Arpit Nayak, Chaithra J, Shaina Ahluwalia, Shreyasee Raj, Shashank Nayar, Nallur Sethuraman, Harshith Aranya and Gautami Khandke. Additional reporting by David Gregorio and Aurora Ellis.
Sources
Deaths data from state and local governments and health authorities; Reuters reporting; U.S. Navy
Edited by
Jon McClure, Lisa Shumaker