Every morning, Robert Anderson oversees the grim job of updating the COVID-19 death toll for the United States, the highest in the world to date. The never-ending onslaught could lead to despair, but for Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it provides a sense of purpose amid the pandemic’s chaos.

“I feel like I’m doing the dead an important service, to make sure that they are counted, so that their experience can inform programs and policy that may help others,” he says.

Now that the U.S. has crossed 100,000 coronavirus deaths, and with its outbreak far from over, these numbers allow scientists and government officials to track the pandemic’s severity and precisely allocate