Counting and attributing deaths to the coronavirus is not easy. That’s one reason it’s useful to look at “excess deaths” to judge the toll and severity of this plague in various parts of the world.

Excess deaths are basically the answer to a subtraction problem. Look at how many deaths typically occur in a given city, state, or country in a given week or month, adjust for population change, and then see how many people died there in that week or month in 2020.