500,000 lives lost

Tracing Covid-19 deaths across the country from the first death to the hardest-hit county.

By Elliott Ramos, Pedro Barquinha and Jiachuan Wu
Feb. 22, 2021

The United States on Sunday hit the half-a-million mark for the number of lives claimed by Covid-19.

Nearly a year since the coronavirus was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, 100,000 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. was the low estimate. Early on, cities such as New York and Chicago were hit hard, particularly in communities of color. Then, hot spots in nursing homes and meatpacking plants began to emerge as the virus hit suburban and rural communities.

The death toll in the U.S. would eventually eclipse that of every other country, and has claimed many more lives since then.

Scroll through the map to trace Covid-19 deaths across the country from the first death to the hardest-hit county.

Methodology
NBC News, using Johns Hopkins University's per-county Covid-19 death counts and the U.S. Census Bureau's 2010 decennial census, plotted deaths based on census block-level populations within the county the deaths were reported in. Locations are representative and, except for Chicago, not exact. The locations of Chicago's Covid-19 deaths came from the Cook County Medical Examiner.