COVID-19: 20% of American Deaths Have Been in These 15 Counties

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 7, 7:41AM EST

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COVID-19: 20% of American Deaths Have Been in These 15 Counties — © Tempura / E+ via Getty Images

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen in the United States at an astonishingly fast pace. According to the Microsoft Bing COVID-19 Tracker, 363,727 Americans have died, which was up by 3,882 yesterday. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation forecasts that figure could be over 700,000 by April 1. Despite a nearly nationwide spread in deaths that has been damaging in places are small as the Dakotas, many of the fatalities have been in a handful of counties. Fifteen of these have accounted for 20% of America’s fatal COVID-19 cases.

The county with the most coronavirus deaths is Los Angeles County, the largest in the country by population at over 10 million. Some 11,071 people have died of COVID-19 there. California is a major hotspot. Intensive care unit bed use in Los Angeles is close to or at capacity. The pace of these deaths continues to accelerate.

Cook County, next on the list by deaths at 8,523, is home to Chicago, which was hit early in the spread from March through early May.

Almost half of the counties on the list are in and around New York City, which was the primary epicenter early on. Kings County, which is the borough of Brooklyn, has posted 7,788 fatal cases. Queens County has posted 7,700, and New York County, home to Manhattan, has 3,362. Nearby Middlesex County, New Jersey, has posted 2,784 deaths. Essex County, also in New Jersey, has had 2,410. Nassau County is directly east of New York City and has posted 2,431. The total in Suffolk County, also to the east, is 2,376. The number of deaths in and around the city is so high, it almost certainly will not be matched by any other metro area.
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The other counties with high death counts also contain some of America’s largest cities. The country with the highest death count after Queens is Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, where fatal cases have reached 5,346. Miami-Dade, just behind Bronx County, has had 4,257. Wayne County, home to Detroit, has had 3,702. Like New York, most of the Detroit deaths came very early in the pandemic. Deaths in Harris County, home to Houston, have reached 3,453. In Philadelphia County, the number is up to 2,524. And in Clark County, home to Las Vegas, they have reached 2,449.

All of this goes to show that large centers of population are at the center of America’s problem. That cuts two ways. The first is that the counties around New York City have had death rates that have sharply slowed. That is largely due to forced shutdowns and pressure on the population to wear masks and social distance. In places like Miami, which are nowhere as strict with these measures, the death toll continues to mount fairly fast.

New forecast American deaths could reach 700,000. Read why here.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.