A quarter million dead
By 
The CDC tracks excess deaths in the US per week. This is a technical concept, which in its simplest form could be expressed as, “how many deaths have we seen in the subject population, above and beyond the number we would expect to see if conditions were unchanged?”
The overwhelming majority of the time, there are no excess deaths in the US by this definition: entire years go by without a single week in which the death rate exceeded the expected death rate.
By the most straightforward calculation method, the USA has now seen at least 245,305 excess deaths since February, when the COVID epidemic began (The actual number is higher, because data collection from state health departments lags real time, sometimes by as much as several weeks).
Not all of these excess deaths have been due directly to COVID, although that’s no doubt been the cause in the vast majority of cases. But COVID seems to be causing significant numbers of excess deaths indirectly. The causes could be many: people not seeking needed medical treatment, people falling into the kind of deep despair that produces drug and alcohol overdoses, as well as more intentional forms of suicide, along with who knows what else.
To what can we compare a quarter million excess deaths? It’s more than the total number of homicides in the US over the past 15 years. It’s more than the total number of AIDS deaths in the US during the first 12 years of that epidemic. It’s a 9/11 every day for twelve weeks. And all these deaths have happened over the course of less than six months, with little sign that the calamity is going to abate any time soon.
An enormous percentage of these deaths are attributable directly to the malignant incompetence of Donald Trump, and the Republican party that enables him.
Total deaths yesterday from COVID:
Spain: 25
Australia: 23
Japan: 17
UK: 12
Canada: 8
Germany: 7
South Korea: 1
USA: 1,143