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Daily Data and Projections on COVID-19 Death Rates

by B. Ravikumar and G. Vandenbroucke 
posted online March 30, 2020
updated June 29, 2020

Note: An On the Economy blog post with additional explanation of this data was published on April 13: Is the U.S. Looking Like Italy? Projections on COVID-19 Death Rates

Chart 1

The U.S. population is 327 million. As of March 21, 2020, the U.S. had 327 deaths related to COVID-19. That is a death rate of 1 per 1 million people.   

The population of Italy is 60 million. As of March 2, 2020, Italy had 60 deaths related to COVID-19. That is also a death rate of 1 per 1 million people.   

We use the actual number of COVID-19-related deaths (first chart) to calculate projections for the U.S. (second chart) based on other countries’ experiences.

Chart 2

The right axis gives the total number of deaths, the left axis gives the death rates per 1 million people, and the x axis tracks the number of days since the death rate was 0.05 per 1 million people for all the listed countries.

The U.S. had 16 deaths by March 7, 2020—which is a death rate of 0.05 per 1 million people. It took 17 days for South Korea to go from a death rate of 0.05 per million people to a rate of 1 per 1 million people. If the U.S. had followed South Korea's death rate, then U.S. deaths would have reached a rate of 1 per 1 million people on March 24, 2020. In reality, it reached that death rate earlier, on March 21, 2020.

Source for Chart 1 and Chart 2: Data repository for the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Visual Dashboard operated by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE). Our expectation is to update these projections daily as new data are published.

© 2020, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. These views do not reflect the opinion of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System.

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