PRELIMINARY: COVID-19 and Households’ Financial Distress

The U.S. population is 327 million. As of March 21, 2020, the U.S. had 327 deaths related to COVID-19. That is a death rate of 1 per 1 million people.  

The population of Italy is 60 million. As of March 2, 2020, Italy had 60 deaths related to COVID-19. That is also a death rate of 1 per 1 million people.  

We use the actual number of COVID-19-related deaths (first chart) to calculate projections for the U.S. (second chart) based on other countries’ experiences.

Chart 2

The right axis gives the total number of deaths, the left axis gives the death rates per 1 million people, and the x axis tracks the number of days since the death rate was 0.05 per 1 million people for all the listed countries.

The U.S. had 16 deaths by March 7, 2020—which is a death rate of 0.05 per 1 million people. It took 17 days for South Korea to go from a death rate of 0.05 per million people to a rate of 1 per 1 million people. If the U.S. had followed South Korea's death rate, then U.S. deaths would have reached a rate of 1 per 1 million people on March 24, 2020. In reality, it reached that death rate earlier, on March 21, 2020.