Were over 2,000 suicides officially reported in the U.S. the day after the 2024 U.S. presidential election? No, that's not true: Lead Stories found no reports confirming that. The figure widely shared online is more consistent with global statistics over the years and is roughly 15 times higher than historic numbers for the U.S. -- but as of this writing there were no reliable statistics of that many suicides on that day globally.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on November 6, 2024. It said:
🔥🚨BREAKING 2038 suicides have been reported today. If this is linked to the election Democrats have blood on their hands for years of fear mongering a fake narrative.
This is what it looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Nov 7 15:40:10 2024 UTC)
The post didn't name a specific location but was published on the day after the 2024 U.S. presidential election (archived here) and mentioned "Democrats," implying that the figure was the U.S. daily statistics.
But, unlike votes, such data is not reported in real time. As of this writing, Lead Stories found no credible sources that published updated information on the number of suicides in the U.S. for the period covering November 6, 2024.
A Google search across U.S. government websites (archived here) showed no such results:
(Source: Google screenshot taken on Thu Nov 7 16:08:58 2024 UTC)
A search for the keywords seen (archived here) across Google News for the same period led to a single article that discussed the 2023 statistics in Iowa.
According to the website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (archived here), roughly 134 people die by suicide daily on average in the U.S. That is an estimate derived from the annual total divided by the number of calendar days, not a specific number of deaths occurring on one particular day.
The most recent CDC provisional data based on received but not fully reviewed death certificates ends in March 2024. As the screenshot below shows, it's grouped by month, not day. This preliminary information is generally consistent with historic trends:
(Source: CDC screenshot taken on Thu Nov 7 21:00:51 2024 UTC)
The figure from the post on X is more consistent with global numbers tracked by the World Health Organization (WHO): In 2019, it reported roughly 1,970 daily deaths by suicide worldwide (archived here). That is also an estimate and an average -- not a recent figure and not a figure for a particular day.
No 2024 search results (archived here) from the WHO website cited on X mention the specific number from the post:
(Source: Google screenshot taken on Thu Nov 7 16:25:34 2024 UTC)
Furthermore, the WHO mortality data that includes all causes was last updated on February 21, 2024, (archived here) -- more than half a year before the 2024 election day.
In a subsequent post (archived here), the account that published the claim on X said that the source for the figure was not the World Health Organization (WHO), whose name appeared in the entry reviewed in this story, but a website called worldometers.info. It's an obscure resource (archived here) that appears to show multiple live metrics but doesn't fully disclose its data-gathering and data-verification practices. As of this writing, the website showed a subsection that was similarly looking at what was shared in the post on X. It was published in the column "Health" but didn't specify the geography for the numbers:
(Source: worldometers.info screenshot taken on Thu Nov 7 16:04:06 2024 UTC)
That website linked to a WHO webpage "that cannot be found" (archived here), as of this writing. That page's most recent previously archived copy was dated by August 2012.
Lead Stories contacted the WHO and CDC for additional comments but didn't receive an immediate response.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims mentioning the 2024 U.S. presidential election can be found here.
