Official COVID-19 figures and case counts confound the effectiveness of policies across different geographies. For this reason, epidemiologists analyze excess mortality. Estimates of excess deaths provide information about the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic, including deaths that are directly or indirectly attributed to COVID-19. For more information on the definition, click here.
Excess deaths from COVID-19 = (Observed Number of Deaths in that same week in 2020 during the pandemic) - (Predicted Number of Deaths in a week given average deaths between 2017-2019 for that week)
Below we provide an analysis of excess death figures by state.
In the map, we are calculating a weekly average for each state. This average doesn't account for different circumstances in each state. For instance, while the average excess mortality in New York is similar to North Dakota, it is worth noting the peak occurred at different months. In New York, the peak in excess deaths occurred in the first months of the pandemic, while in North Dakota, this happened later. These differences occurred because New York is more connected to international travel, which meant COVID-19 struck earlier than in North Dakota.
This website goes beyond basic case counts to understand the behavior of COVID-19 across different states in the US. We believe that case counts and official COVID-19 deaths are useful to identify outbreaks. However, these figures fail to identify how lethal the virus is with respect to other diseases because COVID-19 case and death tolls:
If you want to understand possible causes of the differences in excess deaths, you can also dig into the Possible Causes tab. We provide a deeper analylis of figures that are associated with excess deaths during this pandemic. We also provide additional selected references for further reading.