On March 9, I wrote a post titled “COVID-19 in context” which showed that COVID-19 (annualized) death rate would make it the the 27th leading cause of death worldwide. By March 21st, it was the 17th leading cause of death. Now, on March 31st, COVID-19 is the 13th leading cause of death (worldwide), if we annualize today’s death rate from the WHO situation report. Here is the latest figure from the March 31 WHO situation report.
![](https://www.healthcare-economist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2020-03-31-20_37_02-20200331-sitrep-71-covid-19.pdf.png)
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200331-sitrep-71-covid-19.pdf
When this post was written, there were 750,890 COVID cases worldwide with 57,610 deaths. New cases have appeared to flatten a bit based on the WHO data but the most recent data from John Hopkins shows an increasing trend in number of cases when adding in a full count of today’s numbers. Nevertheless, COVID-19 still falls behind other diseases such as Diarrheal diseases, Diabetes, Liver diseases, Road injuries and Kidney disease (mortality ranks #8-#12) and just ahead of tuberculosis and HIV (ranks #13-#14).
![](https://www.healthcare-economist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Worldwide-deaths-per-day.png)
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington projects that the peak number of COVID-19 cases in the US will occur on April 15. They also project that by August there will be a total of 83,967 COVID-19 deaths. If this number holds and we assume that the 2020 number of deaths for other diseases is the same as the number 2019 US deaths, then COVID-19 would be the #7 leading cause of death in the US, on par with diabetes.
![](https://www.healthcare-economist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Projected-causes-of-death-2020-2.png)
I wonder how many people will die from other diseases that normally would have been treatable, but went under-cared-for bc of hospital overcrowding? May be difficult to calculate secondary death toll of adjacent deaths, have no idea how economists would go about measuring that. What a puzzle!
Thank you Jason
How do we pull ourselves out of such a predicament? It heartbreaks that cases and deaths are rising so exponentially! Quite disheartening! A solution needs to be found ASAP!
This article did not age well. We’re at 72,800+ COVID-19 deaths on May 6th. 83,967 in August would now be viewed as incredibly good luck, which is a sad commentary.
COVID-19 could well be the #3 cause of death in the United States this year, and that’s horrible.