Visualizing the deadliest 12 months in modern American history
The country only had a few hundred known cases at the time, but that was misleading. With limited testing, it was spreading widely and quickly without detection. By the end of March, hundreds of people were dying of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, each day.
It isn’t yet known exactly how many people died of the disease during the past 12 months, nor will we probably have a precise count. We do know, though, that 2020 was almost certainly the deadliest year in modern American history if not American history broadly. The Associated Press reported in December that the toll would probably top 3.2 million — the first time on record that the number of Americans to die in a calendar year has exceeded 3 million.
The only other year so obviously anomalous in the past century was 1918, a year in which there was an influenza pandemic.
That total is misleading, given that there are far more people living in the United States now than there were a century ago. A death toll of 3.2 million would be just under 1 percent of the country’s population — lower than the death rate for much of the early part of the 20th century but higher than at any point since the late 1960s.
Again, not all of these deaths were from covid-19. The current estimate of the number of deaths from covid-19 (an estimate which, again, is almost certainly too low) is that about 529,000 people have died of the disease. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, indicate the country saw at least 600,000 excess deaths from the beginning of March last year through the middle of February, a calculation that doesn’t include every death from the past several weeks.
Those excess deaths track with the surges in coronavirus infections, but some portion of the total may be from other factors tangentially related to the pandemic response, such as increased drug overdoses.
While many of those excess deaths occurred at the outset of the pandemic in the hard-hit states of New York and New Jersey, state-level data show nearly every state saw significant increases in deaths during the past 12 months relative to the number of deaths officials would have expected given past trends.
On average, states saw totals above the excess-death threshold in two-thirds of the weeks since the beginning of March 2020. The highest percentage was in Illinois, where deaths exceeded that threshold in 49 of the past 52 weeks for which there are data. It’s followed by Maryland, where the threshold was exceeded in 48 weeks. The state that fared the best was Hawaii, where deaths were above that threshold in only six weeks.
One year ago, figures like these would have seemed unlikely if not impossible. The idea that half a million people might die of a disease over the next 12 months was near-inconceivable, more than twice the upper limit of the 100,000-to-240,000 range offered by the administration of Donald Trump last spring.
Now, though, the magnitude of the toll has become almost unremarkable.
