global mortality

people dying right now

7,792people

modelled as people within the final hour of life

modelled estimate · updated every second · nothing here is actually being counted

deaths since you opened this page

deaths every day

187,000

within the final hour of life

7,792

by the numbers

deaths every second

people worldwide

deaths every year

68,301,568

people worldwide

by country — right now

country	local time	people
India	06:11	1,388
China	08:41	1,334
United States	19:41	324
Indonesia	07:41	271
Pakistan	05:41	242
Nigeria	01:41	225
Brazil	21:41	202
Bangladesh	06:41	167
Russia	03:41	136
Ethiopia	03:41	128

How this works (the honest bit). Deaths are based on recorded mortality, not predicted individual deaths: roughly 68.3 million people died worldwide in 2021, the latest year the World Health Organization has complete estimates for. That is about two every second, or 187,000 a day. The figure at the top is not a rate but a window - it shows the people whose deaths fall within the final hour of life, which is about 7,800 at any moment. That window is our choice, not a clinical definition. Dying is a process rather than an instant, so any duration we picked would be an invention; we have stated ours rather than hidden it. The number does not change with the time of day, because dying does not follow a local clock the way eating or sleeping does. Every figure on this page is a model built from population data and the assumptions above. It is an estimate, it moves every second, and at least one of them is certainly true.

What this number is made of

This page counts deaths, not people dying in front of you. The figure is a model: a global annual total, divided by the world population, applied continuously. It is an average, and every death inside it was an individual with a name.

Deaths worldwide, 2021 68.3 million, WHO estimate

Deaths worldwide, a typical year closer to 60 million

Leading cause, worldwide ischaemic heart disease - 13% of all deaths

Cardiovascular disease overall about 32% of all deaths

Deaths every second about two

Change since 2000 global life expectancy has risen by more than six years

The one honest caveat 2021 was not a normal year

Two things worth stating plainly. First, 2021 is the latest year with complete WHO estimates and it was unusually high - COVID-19 was directly responsible for 8.7 million deaths that year. A non-pandemic year sits closer to 60 million, so the figure on this page runs slightly high, and we would rather say so than quietly pick a more flattering number. Second, the model does not adjust for age, sex or country: it applies one global average everywhere, which means it overstates deaths in young populations and understates them in old ones. The country table shows where the model thinks deaths are happening, not where they are being recorded.

World Health Organization, Global Health Estimates - cause-specific mortality, 2000-2021. Leading-cause shares from the same release.