• More than 13,000 Americans died last week from COVID-19, surpassing past weekly averages for other top causes of death like heart disease and cancer.
• The US has more coronavirus cases and deaths than any other country: as of Friday morning more than 667,000 people have gotten sick and more than 32,000 have died.
• Models are now predicting fewer deaths than before – around 60,000 by August – but experts warn that number could rise again if social-distancing measures don’t remain in place.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

As the new coronavirus continues to spread throughout the US, it’s now killing more Americans per week than other top causes of death like heart disease and cancer have in past years.

Last week, more than 13,000 people died from COVID-19, surpassing the nearly 12,500 killed on average each week in 2018 by heart conditions and the 11,500 killed by cancer, showing just how quickly the virus has taken its toll on American lives.

Over the past few weeks, the US has become the hardest-hit country by the pandemic, with more than 32,000 deaths and 667,000 confirmed cases as of this morning. Worldwide, more than 143,000 people have died, meaning the coronavirus has already claimed more lives than outbreaks of the Ebola, MERS, and SARS viruses.

Business Insider compiled data from The COVID Tracking Project, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the US Census to show how COVID-19 deaths over time compare to other common causes of death in the US: heart disease, cancer, bad flu seasons, and car crashes.

COVID-19 is now killing more Americans on a weekly basis than heart disease or cancer did on average per week in 2018.

The coronavirus has spread rapidly in the US, and deaths have grown exponentially along with it. From April 9 to April 15, at least 13,613 people died from COVID-19, compared to 9,801 the week before.

By comparison, 12,451 people died on average per week from heart diseases and 11,521 per week from cancer in 2018, while fewer than 800 people died from car crashes on any given week that year.

Even bad flu seasons, like the 2017-2018 season in which more than 80,000 Americans were killed – including 7,119 in a single week – didn’t claim lives as quickly as COVID-19 did last week.

To make it easier to understand how the causes compare over the course of the year, we calculated the average weekly deaths from annual heart disease and cancer data. We also combined data from the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 flu seasons (which start in October in the CDC data) to show the total number of deaths in 2018.

The numbers in the above chart represent how many deaths per million people different causes were responsible for each week, not how many total people they killed.

---

The US could be nearing its coronavirus “peak,” but the worst is far from over.

While experts expect the pandemic to peak in the US sometime in the coming months, the number of people who will ultimately get sick or die depends on how successful the country is able to maintain social distancing, ramp up testing efforts, and develop treatments and vaccines.

It’s also still too early to calculate the overall death rate of COVID-19, but the US has seen a lower rate so far than many other countries, with around 4.4% of those diagnosed with the disease dying from it.

That and other factors have led disease modelers to lower their fatality estimates, with the main model used in the US predicting 60,415 deaths by August, assuming social distancing measures are kept in place until then.

Business Insider Emails & Alerts

Site highlights each day to your inbox.

Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.