This County Has the Most COVID-19 Deaths in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 30, 11:30AM EST

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This County Has the Most COVID-19 Deaths in America — © Mario Tama / Getty Images News via Getty Images

So far, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been 261,504,022 confirmed cases worldwide and 5,199,821 people have died from the disease, according to the Bing COVID-19 Tracker. Each of these figures is considered low. The spread of the new Omicron variant threatens another acceleration of infections worldwide.

Despite its highly advanced medical system, the United States has both the highest confirmed case count and the highest number of deaths among all nations by far. Confirmed cases in America total 48,411,494, about 18% of the global number. COVID-19 deaths, at 779,293, are about 15% on the same basis.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which issues carefully followed COVID-19 forecasts, puts U.S. COVID-19 deaths at just over 1 million by February 28. Its “worst-case” forecast is over 1.2 million.

The state with the most COVID-19 deaths is California at 74,553. This makes sense because California has by far the largest population of any state at 39,538,223.
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The county with the largest number of COVID-19 deaths is also the largest by population as well. Johns Hopkins puts the deaths in Los Angeles County at 27,138. The county’s population is 10,014,009.

A huge surge in COVID-19 cases came to California and Los Angeles late in the pandemic. The areas largely avoided the jump in cases in March, April and May of 2020. This was the wave that devastated New York City and the surrounding areas.

While California and Los Angeles County cases rose during the summer 2020 surge, the areas were devastated by the December 2020-January 2021 surge.

As the LA Times reported about the surge late last year: “December is a COVID-19 disaster in California. January is shaping up to be bleak too for deluged hospital.”

Now, after the fourth wave in the United States driven by the Delta variant, a possible fifth wave may be to come. Because of its size, whether or not this happens, the county will remain in number one in U.S. COVID-19 deaths.

Click here to read about the state with the most COVID-19 deaths in America.
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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.