Lexington County has suffered 24 corona virus deaths and 484 confirmed cases.

Columbia and Richland County suffered 57 deaths and 1,119 cases, the highest count in the state.

Yet our state’s 10,493 confirmed cases is one of the lowest in the nation.

Has covid-19 become the leading cause of death here and across the country?

At its worst, it killed 2,584 Americans in 24 hours, mostly in large cities.

Daily totals aren’t available for heart disease which is generally considered the leading killer.

Some reports compare the average, around 1,900 a day, to covid-19’s high death count.

That makes the virus look deadlier.

But so far this year, 3 times as many of us died of heart disease.

“I’ve got about 1 million deaths from January to April,” Bob Anderson of the National Center for Health Statistics told The Wall Street Journal.

“About 230,000 are heart disease, 200,000 are cancer, 61,000 are chronic lowerrespiratory diseases, 55,000 are accidents and 52,000 are strokes.”

Most of the top 10 leading causes of death are groups of similar diseases.

Deaths attributed to heart disease include people who die from ischemic heart disease, rheumatic heart failure and cardiac arrhythmia.

All cancers are lumped together and so are all accidents.

“With covid-19, we’re talking about a single infectious agent,” said Keri Althoff of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“That’s a lot of deaths for one cause.”

The number is also probably low.

The 1st covid-19 deaths were likely under-counted because health-care givers didn’t recognize the disease or lacked tests to verify it.

At that time, they didn’t even have a specific diagnostic code to document confirmed infections.