Covid-19 Now the Leading Cause of Death in America

This week, Covid-19 passed heart disease and cancer as the leading cause of death per day in the United States. In this graph made by Dr. Maria Danilychev using data from Worldometer and the CDC, you can see that Covid-19 overtook heart disease sometime on Monday or Tuesday.

If the data in NYC is any indication, the number of nationwide Covid-19 deaths may be undercounted, so this transition probably happened sooner.¹ Hopefully through the social distancing and other measures put in place to flatten the curve, the number of daily Covid-19 deaths won’t start beating out all other causes combined before it starts declining.

1. Several months from now, it will be easier to get a more accurate count of how many people died by looking at the “baseline” rate of death and comparing it with the actual numbers. Unless this sort of recount is politicized, which it will be, and *siiiigh*↩

• Covid-19
• infoviz
• Maria Danilychev
• medicine
• science