Counting What We Lose

In the United States, we have robust systems for tracking mortality, carefully documenting how many lives are lost each year.

But as sociologist and demographer Elizabeth Wrigley-Field points out, those numbers don’t always tell the full story.

“Working in the U.S., we always know how many people have died,” she shares. “But we don’t always know the characteristics of people who have died — or what their loss represents.”

That gap, between what we can measure and what we can understand, is the heart of her work.

Beyond the numbers

A mortality demographer, Wrigley-Field studies patterns of death, with a focus on COVID-19 and racial inequities in the U.S. But her research asks a different kind of question: not just what causes unequal death rates, but what those inequalities take away.

“If your own life is shorter than it could have been, what does that mean? What opportunities do you lose out on, and what do your loved ones miss out on?”

Some of those losses can be measured. In her work, she draws on research showing that disparities in life expectancy can shape electoral outcomes. Other losses are harder to quantify: the stories, relationships, and memories that never have the chance to unfold.

“Human meaning” in the data

Wrigley-Field describes her approach as “humanistic demography,” bringing together technical analysis and questions of value.

“The way demographers study death rates can be very technical and very dry,” she says. “We’re often focused on small details: who fills out a death certificate, how categories are defined, because those details really matter for the data.”

But the reason the data matter, she emphasizes, is not technical at all.

“We care about death rates because we care about our lives,” she says. “We care because there are things we want to do, relationships we value, projects that matter to us.”

Her work bridges two ways of thinking: one focused on individuals and meaning, the other on large-scale population patterns. She is interested in what becomes possible when those approaches are brought together.

Counting the pandemic

This mindset shaped her work during COVID-19, where she and her collaborators tackled a deceptively simple question: how many people actually died?

Because official counts rely on death certificates, which can be inconsistent, especially outside of hospitals, Wrigley-Field’s team used multiple approaches. 

One approach looks at excess mortality: how many more people died than would have been expected without a pandemic. Wrigley-Field and her coauthors refined this approach, such as by examining patterns in the timing of deaths, identifying suspicious overlaps between COVID and non-COVID spikes. A quite different approach uses hospital data to model what COVID deaths look like, then applies that model to deaths occurring elsewhere.

Each method has limitations, but together, they tell a consistent story. Their findings suggest that COVID deaths in the U.S. were about 15-20% higher than the official counts.

Behind the analysis, though, was something more personal. Early on in the pandemic, one of her parents experienced a medical emergency, and Wrigley-Field contracted COVID while helping to care for them.

“When I’m writing about the number of deaths, it’s not always apparent that what I’m really writing about is how scary it was not to know if my family would be okay,” she recalls. “But that’s why we do this.”

Accurate counts, she adds, are a matter of respect — for those who died and those who lived through it.

From research to community

That commitment extended beyond her research. In Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhood, Wrigley-Field joined a grassroots effort to make vaccines more accessible, particularly for East African immigrant communities.

The Seward Vaccine Equity Project, a small, volunteer-led initiative, organized vaccination clinics at local mosques and community spaces. Over the course of a year, they helped administer more than 500 vaccinations, most to the communities they had set out to serve.

The experience also deepened her appreciation for public health work on the ground.

“I was so impressed by the health professionals and community partners involved,” she says. “It gave me a much closer view of what public health looks like in practice.”

In the classroom

Here in CLA, Wrigley-Field brings these questions into the classroom.

Her course Diseases, Disasters, and Other Killers draws students from across the University, many encountering sociology for the first time. That mix, she says, is part of what makes teaching the course so rewarding.

Over time, she has also begun to incorporate more of her own research into the class, not as a shortcut, but as a way to show how knowledge is produced.

“Students want to understand not just the material, but where it comes from,” she says.

What we count. And why.

Today, the college’s 2026 Dean’s Medalist honoree is exploring how demographic patterns shape something less expected: historical memory. Her current work examines how connections between generations influence which stories, movements, and experiences persist over time.

For her, these questions all point back to the same idea.

Counting deaths is not just about numbers. It’s about understanding what is lost — and what that loss reveals about the world we live in.