A lot of people seem to be under the misperception that the pandemic isn’t causing excess deaths. Here’s a CDC graph showing weekly deaths in the United States from all causes going back to the beginning of 2017.

The blue bars represent how many people died each week in the US from any and all causes: whether COVID, cancer, a broken heart, or BASE-jumping.

The orange line tracks long-term average deaths for that week of the year, while the red line shows what the CDC considers the bottom of the range of definitely excessive deaths, which are marked with red crosses on the blue bars. For example, there was a brief spell of excess deaths in January 2018, and then the three humps of the COVID pandemic: the big one that peaked in mid-April 2020, the summer hump largely in the sunbelt, and the current Third Hump that began in early autumn in the Dakotas and has been spreading steadily since.

Keep in mind this technical methodology decision: that the CDC chose to graph actual date of death rather than when the data trickled in to the CDC. So the blue bars keep growing in height for up to 8 weeks after the death takes place. Therefore, you can see the current Third Hump of deaths at the right edge of the graph, but please don’t get the impression that because the very latest week shows a sudden drop in deaths that that means the country is out of the woods. The latest week being very low is just an artifact of how long it takes death notices to trickle in. The Third Hump is likely already worse than the Second Hump in the mid-summer if the CDC had notice of all the recent deaths.

Here are the weekly data for 2020. Keep in mind that the most recent weeks at the bottom of this table understate the actual number of deaths due to not all death reports having trickled in yet. And December is likely to be pretty bad when finally counted up sometime in February.