On Sept. 29, 2020, the recorded worldwide death toll from Covid-19 reached 1 million. Six days earlier the United States reached 200,000 Covid-related deaths. So how did the United States with only 4 percent of the world’s population manage to capture 20 percent of the world’s deaths in this pandemic?

The 19 countries listed in figure 1 account for 85 percent of the Covid-related deaths worldwide, as reported by the European CDC. Here we can see how the U.S. death toll exceeds all others.

 
Figure 1: Number of Covid-related deaths reported by 19 countries as of Sept. 26, 2020

The short explanation for this dubious achievement is that between April 1 and the present, the United States had an average of 27 percent of the worldwide total number of confirmed cases of Covid-19. With that kind of market share, the high death toll was sure to follow. But a more detailed answer requires that we look at the number of deaths per capita and the rate at which these death tolls are growing.

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