COVID-19 Excess Death Update
Published at 08:41 on 25 July 2026
Back in 2021, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations about the excess COVID-19 death rate in the USA, compared to Canada. I came to the conclusion that it was around 60%, at the time around 380,000 Americans.
Given that most of that was caused by conspiracy-mongering aided and abetted by Trump fascists, it seems fair to give them the credit for the deaths. Similar logic is used to add numbers to Stalin’s and Mao’s death counts, after all. They are so high not because either dictator directly and deliberately ordered the execution of so many victims, but because of policy choices (primarily agricultural policy) that led to such deaths more indirectly (via famine). Almost nobody gripes about this accounting being unfair to Stalin or Mao.
Anyhow, now that the pandemic has settled down into a routine global endemic disease situation, similar to colds and flu, I figured a retrospective was in order.
The data are here and a quick look shows that although the raw numbers are higher, the basic ratio is almost exactly the same: roughly 60% of the deaths in the USA are excess deaths compared to Canada. That ends up raising Trump’s COVID body count to around 740,000.