How Many People Die Each Day?
By How Many People Die Each Day?
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, the media continues to rattle off statistics at full force.
However, without a frame of reference, numbers such as the death toll
can be difficult to interpret. Mortalities attributed to the virus, for
example, are often measured in the thousands of people per day
globally—but is this number a little or a lot, relative to typical
causes of death?
Today’s graphic uses data from Our World in Data to
provide context with the total number of worldwide daily deaths. It
also outlines how many people who die each day from specific causes.
Worldwide Deaths by Cause
Nearly 150,000 people
die per day worldwide, based on the latest comprehensive research
published in 2017. Which diseases are the most deadly, and how many
lives do they take per day?
Here’s how many people die each day on average, sorted by cause:
| Rank | Cause | Daily Deaths |
|---|---|---|
| #1 | Cardiovascular diseases | 48,742 |
| #2 | Cancers | 26,181 |
| #3 | Respiratory diseases | 10,724 |
| #4 | Lower respiratory infections | 7,010 |
| #5 | Dementia | 6,889 |
| #6 | Digestive diseases | 6,514 |
| #7 | Neonatal disorders | 4,887 |
| #8 | Diarrheal diseases | 4,300 |
| #9 | Diabetes | 3,753 |
| #10 | Liver diseases | 3,624 |
| Total Daily Deaths | 147,118 |
Showing 1 to 10 of 32 entries
Cardiovascular diseases, or diseases of the heart and blood vessels, are
the leading cause of death. However, their prominence is not reflected
in our perceptions of death nor in the media.
While the death toll for HIV/AIDS peaked in 2004, it still affects many
people today. The disease causes over 2,600 daily deaths on average.
Interestingly, terrorism and natural disasters cause very few deaths in
relation to other causes. That said, these numbers can vary from day to
day—and year to year—depending on the severity of each individual
instance.
Total Daily Deaths by Country
On a national level, these statistics vary further. Below are the total
deaths from all causes for selected countries, based on 2017 data.
China and India both see more than 25,000 total deaths per day, due to their large populations.
However, with 34.7 daily deaths per million people each day, Russia has
the highest deaths proportional to population out of any of these
countries.
Keeping Perspective
While these numbers help provide some context for the global scale of COVID-19 deaths, they do not offer a direct comparison.
The fact is that many of the aforementioned death rates are based on
much larger and consistent sample sizes of data. On the flipside, since
WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, daily confirmed
deaths have fallen in a wide range between 272 and 10,520 per day—and
there is no telling what could happen in the future.
On top of this variance, data on confirmed COVID-19 deaths has other
quirks. For example, testing rates for the virus may vary between
jurisdictions, and there have also been disagreements between
authorities on how deaths should even be tallied in the first place.
This makes getting an accurate picture surprisingly complicated.
While it’s impossible to know the true death toll of COVID-19, it is
clear that in some countries daily deaths have reached rates 50% or
higher than the historical average for periods of time:
Time, and further analysis, will be required to determine a more accurate COVID-19 death count.
