By Mike Stunson

McClatchy Washington Bureau

It only took a month for coronavirus to become the third-leading cause of death in the United States, according to a San Diego doctor and data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

COVID-19 is now killing 748 people per day in the U.S., Dr. Maria Danilychev said, citing data from Worldometers.info. Only heart disease (1,774 deaths per day) and cancer (1,641 deaths per day) are killing more people daily than coronavirus, CDC data shows.

Danilychev, a San Diego doctor, made the conclusion and charted coronavirus’ growth throughout the country. Coronavirus has surpassed Alzheimer’s, stroke, chronic lung disease and accidents in deaths per day, her data shows.

The CDC’s 2017 data shows more than 647,000 people die from heart disease each year and another 599,000 die from cancer. Accidents, which previously were the No. 3 cause of death, account for 169,000 deaths annually, according to the CDC.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday the White House is predicting between 100,000 and 240,000 people in the U.S. will die from coronavirus.

“This could be a hell of a bad two weeks,” Trump said. “This is going to be three weeks like we’ve never seen before.”

More than 4,100 people have died in the United States from coronavirus, and there have been more than 44,000 deaths worldwide as of April 1, according to Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. topped 1,000 coronavirus deaths March 26 and the number of deaths has continued to exponentially grow.