How Many People Die Each Day?

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
#11	Road injuries	3,406
#12	Kidney disease	3,370
#13	Tuberculosis	3,243
#14	HIV/AIDS	2,615
#15	Suicide	2,175
#16	Malaria	1,698
#17	Homicide	1,111
#18	Parkinson disease	933
#19	Drowning	809
#20	Meningitis	789
#21	Nutritional deficiencies	740
#22	Protein-energy malnutrition	635
#23	Maternal disorders	531
#24	Alcohol use disorders	507
#25	Drug use disorders	456
#26	Conflict	355
#27	Hepatitis	346
#28	Fire	330
#29	Poisonings	198
#30	Heat (hot and cold exposure)	146
#31	Terrorism	72
#32	Natural disasters	26
	Total Daily Deaths	147,118

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.