Actually that's average number of DAILY deaths from the past 7 days, not the number of deaths in the past 7 days. As a lot of people take the weekends off, reporting of new cases and deaths decreases sharply on weekends and increases on Mondays, but in reality people are not dying at a lower rate on weekends. That's why the stats are averaged over 7 days.

For reference, there are about 15k homicides per year in the US, or about 41 per day, which is about 13% of the 316 daily COVID death rate reported by the CDC (and on the front page of the NYTimes site).

I believe the correct number is over 2100, and it's up nearly 15% week-over-week.

Hopefully we are near a peak, but it never seems to register with some people that deaths lag cases by a few weeks, whatever the ratio may be.