With the end of 2020, data about mortality in the US becomes available that we can use to put the coronavirus pandemic into a sensible perspective.

Most major news sources have maintained a daily update of the number of covid deaths throughout most of the year. That number stood at about 350,000 as 2020 turned to 2021. But those news sources never set covid deaths in context of the baseline of annual deaths in America without the coronavirus.

Most citizens had little idea of the normal trend. they knew the coronavirus was causing “more deaths” than normal. But they had no notion of what the normal was. Throughout the year, I asked various acquaintances how many people die in America in a normal year. None one of them knew. Only a few were confident enough to guess, and none of their guesses came within half a million of the correct number.

The chart shows that baseline. Over the past decade, about two-and-a half million Americans die every year. The number of covid deaths in 2020 was about 350,000. Stacked on top of the 2019 baseline of 2.8 million, that will be something near to 3.2 million deaths in 2020. Covid has added an additional 10% to 15% extra growth on top of the 2% to 4% annual increase growth that would have happened anyway.

When the Associated Press reported that the US had “a record number of deaths in 2020” they were saying something we already knew. Even without covid, there was going to be “a record number of deaths.” The US population grows every year, and a constant rate of deaths plus a growing population yields more deaths each year than the last.

All the numbers about covid deaths that we have in early 2021 are preliminary. It takes nearly a full year normally for that count to be checked and doublechecked and reported to the Center for Disease Control. The final, official count of deaths for 2018 were released in December of 2020, so it will surely be more than a year before the numbers are official.

But the preliminary numbers are pretty good. they won’t change by more than a few percentage points up or down from what we see now.

The state of Michigan has moved especially fast in releasing its 2020 estimates. Michigan estimates 109,868 people died in that state in 2020 — a jump of 12% from the 97,784 in 2019. Those two years are shown below, comparing the cumulative number of deaths in Michigan for 2019 and 2020.

The two lines overlap each other for the first three months — which was before the pandemic emerged. After March, the two lines diverge. And most of the difference is explainable by the disease.

This evidence from Michigan is probably similar to what it will be in most states. Covid-19 causes a significant boost in deaths of 10% to 15% over the baseline.

Another question people haven’t been asking throughout the covid pandemic is, “How do the covid deaths affect the national population? Are we in danger of going extinct?”

The answer is that the US population continued to increase throughout 2020, because the number of babies born outnumbered deaths.

The Center for Disease Control has issued births and deaths for the first half of 2020. The following table shows that, even after the pandemic emerged, births were higher than total deaths. The chart only goes through June of 2020 and some months later in 2020 were pretty bad. There were probably other months in 20202 when deaths exceeded births. But for the year, the US population will increase. August is pretty consistently the top month for births, and that will be true in 2020 as well.

The point of all this is that a clear-thinking person ought to rely on data and not emptions. The year 2020 was typified by commentators of various types talking about “devastated communities” and “overwhelming disaster” and “death on a tragic scale.” Those phrases may be appropriate or they may be exaggerated.

But more certainly, the numbers themselves are reliable. The best way to gauge how many deaths occurred is by stating that number. The best way of describing the increase over normal times is expressed by a percentage. The best way of understanding the significance and scale of an event is by comparing it to historical patterns and baselines.

A wise person, when he or she is think about the quantity of something, thinks with numbers and not adjectives.