Over the past two years, nearly 19,000 more people have died in Cook County than what would have been expected — a figure that demonstrates the enormous toll of the pandemic since the virus claimed its first life here in March 2020.
While COVID-19 has killed nearly 1 million people across the U.S., the data also shows the pandemic corresponded with a spike in local deaths from other causes, including heart disease, drug overdoses and shootings, according to an analysis of county, state and federal statistics as part of an ongoing collaboration between the Sun-Times and the Documenting COVID-19 project at Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and MuckRock.
