Data is provided through the 48th week of 2020. So far this year, the CDC reports that 2,877,601 people have died. At the same point in 2018, the number was 2,606,928, and in 2019, it was 2,614,950. The number of deaths to this point in 2020 is at least 260,000 greater than either of the past two years. But that number is an underestimate because the CDC publishes data based on the number of death certificates it has received. Since it can take a couple of weeks for all death certificates to be recorded, the numbers for the last two weeks, at least, will increase as time goes by. If the last two weeks produce a similar number of deaths as the weeks before, the margin to this point will actually be close to 310,000.

Another way to see the effect of COVID-19 is that more people have died already this year than did in the entirety of either 2018 or 2019. There were 2,831,836 deaths in all of 2018 and 2,845,793 in all of 2019.