“Although total U.S. death counts are remarkably consistent from year to year, U.S. deaths increased by 20% during March-July 2020,” study authors wrote. “COVID-19 was a documented cause of only 67% of these excess deaths.”

“Contrary to skeptics who claim that COVID-19 deaths are fake or that the numbers are much smaller than we hear on the news, our research and many other studies on the same subject show quite the opposite,” lead author Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of VCU’s Center on Society and Health, wrote in a university news release.

During the timeframe under study, there were over 1.3 million deaths in the U.S., and 225,530 excess deaths (150,541 of which were attributed to COVID-19).