Out of the U.S. population of 330 million, about 3 million people die each year, for a crude death rate of 9.1 people per thousand. If, for the sake of argument, we assume that over a year, the coronavirus pandemic causes one million deaths in the United States, the crude death rate would rise to 12.1 per thousand. The average person’s absolute risk of dying from the virus would remain small—roughly a three-out-of-a-thousand chance (1,000,000 extra deaths from COVID-19 divided by 330,000,000 people). That seems low, but this level of mortality would still far surpass all of the threats to life
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