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.
Each dot on the map represents a person who died from Covid-19.
Kirkland, King County
Wash.
The first reported U.S. death from Covid-19 was a man in his 50s in Washington state last Feb. 29. That same day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported its first outbreak, at a long-term care facility in that state.
Santa Clara County, Calif.
It was later revealed that the country’s first actual Covid-19 death was in Santa Clara County, Calif., weeks earlier.
New York City
The first reported case of Covid-19 in New York state was on March 1. The first two Covid deaths followed two weeks later. By the end of the month, New York City had surpassed 1,000 deaths. The death toll in the city is now nearly 29,000.
Chicago
The first reported death from Covid-19 in Chicago was on March 16, 2020. The 61-year-old victim, Patricia Frieson, was a retired nurse from the city’s South Side. Nine days later, her sister died from the virus. Those deaths would portend a disturbing trend: Most of the city’s Covid-19-related deaths were, initially, of Black residents, a disproportionate trend that would be revealed in cities across the country.
Sioux Falls, S.D.
In Sioux Falls, a Smithfield Foods meat processing plant became a Covid-19 hot spot, and was linked to nearly 900 cases, a figure that was later revised to more than 1,000. Four people eventually died in the outbreak. Minnehaha County, where the city is, would eventually see more than 320 Covid-19-related deaths.
Cold Spring, Minn.
The case highlighted how meatpacking plants became virus hot spots in their communities, such as a Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Cold Spring, Minn., which was linked to a 454 percent jump in cases in Stearns County. The county would eventually record nearly 200 deaths from the virus.
Houston
Last summer, when coronavirus cases surged in June, Houston’s Latino community was hit especially hard. Hospitalizations in Harris County were found to be mostly of Hispanic residents, and the county would eventually record more than 4,700 deaths from the virus.
Miami
On July 30, Florida recorded 253 deaths in one day, the state’s highest in one day, after breaking two records days before. Many of the deaths came from Miami-Dade County, which would eventually lose more than 5,200 lives.
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.
