Excess mortality in the United States in 2020: Forecasting and anomaly detection

•Excess mortality surveillance may be more reliable than disease-specific mortality.•This is critical during the COVID-19 pandemic due to burdens of data collection.•We used forecasting of 20 years of all-cause mortality to compute excess mortality.•Our excess deaths match closely with reported COVID-19 specific mortality.•Novel approaches to the collection and real-time reporting of mortality are needed.