In a combative interview on CNN, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. opened the conversation with a throwback claim.
“We had the highest death rate from COVID of any nation on earth,” Kennedy said. When host Dana Bash challenged him, Kennedy doubled down: “What I said was accurate. We had the highest death rate from COVID.”
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for evidence for Kennedy’s statement.
The overwhelming majority of global COVID-19 deaths occurred between January 2020 and March 2023. During that period, the U.S. had the highest number of COVID-19-related deaths, over 1.1 million. In the last few years, the death toll has climbed to 1.2 million.
But during the pandemic’s height, 2020 to 2023, the U.S. did not lead the world in its overall rate of death from the illness. Peru did.
In its tracking of global COVID-19 cases and deaths through March 2023, Johns Hopkins University found that Peru’s population was hit hardest with a rate of 665.84 deaths per 100,000 people.
The U.S.’s per capita death rate was nearly half that with 341.11 deaths per 100,000 people. That is the 14th highest rate. Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania were a few of the countries with higher per capita death rates than the U.S.
Johns Hopkins University also tracked each country’s COVID-19 deaths in comparison with its number of confirmed cases — a metric that can be skewed by how widely a country was testing people for COVID-19 and the size of the outbreak.
The U.S. didn’t lead the world in this “case-fatality ratio” measure, either.
Peru had a case-fatality rate of 4.9% — among the highest rates. The United States had a rate of 1.1%, tied with Canada. America’s case-fatality rate was lower than those of countries including Mexico (4.5%), Ukraine (2.1%), Brazil (1.9%) and Russia (1.8%).
Analysts attributed Peru’s high death rate to several factors including an impoverished and informal economy, lack of protective medical equipment, shortages of oxygen and a weak public health system.
A few countries had case-fatality rates higher than Peru’s: Yemen (18.1%), Sudan (7.9%), Syria (5.5%), and Somalia (5%). But these countries also had very few deaths compared with their population sizes — all below 20 deaths per 100,000 people. These contradictory measures likely indicate poor surveillance testing of milder cases rather than a high death toll.
Another way to look at the numbers is through excess deaths, said Jennifer Nuzzo, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University.
Excess deaths are a count of deaths beyond what would be normally expected. Nuzzo said this is a fairer metric that isn’t as biased by a country’s ability to accurately diagnose infections and causes of deaths.
An analysis of excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 found that countries such as Russia, Mexico and Brazil had higher excess mortality rates than the United States. Additional reviews of excess mortality rates around the world found similar results.
“The bottom line is that, by any measure, the U.S. didn’t experience the most excess deaths of any country,” Nuzzo said. “The U.S. did have more excess deaths than other highly prepared countries, which was a great disappointment.”
Had Kennedy compared the U.S. with other high-income countries, he would have been more accurate, but he said the U.S. did worse than “any nation on earth.”
Kennedy said the U.S. “had the highest death rate from COVID of any nation on earth.”
The U.S. has counted the highest total reported COVID-19 related deaths so far, but when the pandemic’s fatalities were counted per capita, the U.S. is not the world leader.
Peru reported the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per capita during the first three years of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University. Among confirmed cases, Peru and many other countries also had higher fatality rates than the United States. Lastly, measures of excess deaths during the first two years of the pandemic found countries like Russia, Mexico and Brazil had all had higher excess mortality rates than the United States.
None of these methods for quantifying the COVID-19 death rate support Kennedy’s claim. We rate Kennedy’s statement False.
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.
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