These data make clear that covid-19 has led to the deaths of far more people than official statistics suggest (see our briefing). Although we provide an estimated excess-deaths figure for every day since the pandemic began, official covid-19 death statistics are displayed only up to the most recent data release, and are missing afterwards. You can also look up the cumulative total for individual countries in the subsequent table. The interactive chart above lets you compare excess mortality over time in any pair of countries. In cases where death rates fell below their pre-pandemic norms-because covid-19 claimed relatively few victims, while lifestyle changes lowered the toll from other causes such as flu-this number is negative. Excess-deaths data are essential in order to make comparisons between countries on an apples-to-apples basis. Differences between countries in the scale and frequency of testing for SARS-CoV-2-which, along with the severity of the pandemic, determine the official covid-19 death toll-can be vast. The regional estimates above are aggregations of our figures for individual countries.
![us corona deaths us corona deaths](https://c.files.bbci.co.uk/B6A3/production/_115055764_optimised-us_cases_deaths24oct-nc.png)
The most recent cumulative totals are also available below, in table format. The less data that are available in a given country, the less certain we can be about how many excess deaths have actually occurred there, and thus the wider our confidence interval becomes.
![us corona deaths us corona deaths](https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2021/01/08/coronavirus-b117-variant/7f951f39e56d07c3f3dffcad1653336b405c16dd/map-states-600.png)
Our model provides a range (the coloured interval) and a central estimate (the line). In the chart above, you can explore our numbers either for the world as a whole or broken down by region. You can read our methodology here, and inspect all our code, data, and models here. Our final tallies use governments’ official excess-death numbers whenever and wherever they are available, and the model’s estimates in all other cases. It is based both on official excess-mortality data and on more than 100 other statistical indicators. To fill in these voids in our understanding of the pandemic, The Economist has built a machine-learning model, which estimates excess deaths for every country on every day since the pandemic began.
US CORONA DEATHS UPDATE
Some of these places update their figures regularly others have published them only once.
![us corona deaths us corona deaths](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/E96A/production/_111545795_optimised-mortality_rates-nc.png)
![us corona deaths us corona deaths](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/01/30/us/china-coronavirus-contain-promo-1580431440996/china-coronavirus-contain-promo-1580431440996-articleLarge-v9.png)
Including statistics released by sub-national units like provinces or cities, among the world’s 156 countries with at least 1m people we managed to obtain data on total mortality from just 84. The reason that we can provide only a rough estimate, with a wide range of surrounding uncertainty, is that calculating excess deaths for the entire world is complex and imprecise. We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between and additional deaths. Although the official number of deaths caused by covid-19 is now, our single best estimate is that the actual toll is people. This number is the gap between how many people died in a given region during a given time period, regardless of cause, and how many deaths would have been expected if a particular circumstance (such as a natural disaster or disease outbreak) had not occurred. The standard method of tracking changes in total mortality is “excess deaths”. Rather than trying to distinguish between types of deaths, The Economist’s approach is to count all of them.