White House Task Force Sees COVID-19 Death Rate Climbing

COVID-19 trackers working for the White House Coronavirus Task Force see the U.S. COVID-19 death rate rising sharply. The number of COVID-19-related deaths per 100,000 U.S. residents increased to 3 in the week ending Nov. 20, up from 2.3 in the previous week, according to the tracking team's latest weekly assessment of the national situation.

Resources 

• A copy of the White House Coronavirus Task Force weekly report is available here.
• The CDC's weekly COVID-19 report is available here.
• An earlier article about COVID-19 data is available here.

The tracking team's national mortality map shows that the death rate per 100,000 lives is highest in South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana and lowest in Hawaii, Alaska and Vermont. The list of high-population states with many counties where the death rate has been over 10 deaths per 100,000 lives, or 1 death per 10,000 lives, includes Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan and Wisconsin. This is the deadliest pandemic to hit the United States since the 1918 influenza pandemic killed about 500,000 people over a period lasting from early 1918 through early 1920. It caused an overall mortality rate for that entire period of about 500 deaths per 100,000 lives, for a weekly average of about 4 deaths per 100,000 lives per week. The White House task force COVID-19 tracking team found that the detection rate for new cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19, also is increasing, but more slowly than the mortality rate. The number of new cases detected per 100,000 lives increased to 356 in the latest week, from 294 in the previous week. Members of the tracking team continued to describe the pandemic as spreading in an aggressive way in states without aggressive mitigation efforts. — Read U.S. Death Gap Grows: Demographer, on ThinkAdvisor. — Connect with ThinkAdvisor Life/Health on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.