The storm started to develop on Friday and dumped snow across a large region over the weekend. The snow snarled road traffic and led to widespread flight cancellations and power outages before subsiding Monday, leaving behind bitter cold that is expected to linger.
By Tuesday, cities were mobilising emergency responders and resources to ensure that residents, particularly homeless people, were safe, even as more than 550,000 homes and businesses across the country lacked electricity.
Ten of the storm's fatal victims were in New York City, where temperatures were the coldest they had been in eight years, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a news conference on Tuesday, when the low hit minus 13C.
While the 10 victims were found outside, it was not clear whether they were homeless. Mamdani told reporters Monday that some of the dead "had had interactions with our shelter system in the past. It is still too early to share a broader diagnosis or a cause of death".
New York City postponed from this week until early February an annual count of its homeless population required by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development
"Outreach workers should be focused on bringing New Yorkers inside, not on data collection," Mamdani said.
"Here is the bottom line, New York City: Extreme weather is not a personal failure."
In Nashville, Tennessee, a city of about 680,000 where more than 135,000 homes and businesses remain without power, the temperature is expected to drop to minus 14C by Wednesday morning with below-zero wind chills.
Nashville officials said about 1400 homeless people had filled all three of the city's homeless shelters and two overflow shelters, with police and firefighters working overtime and emergency workers checking the streets.
Across the country, storm-related causes of death ranged from hypothermia and exposure to cardiac incidents while clearing snow.
In Bonham, Texas, three young boys died after falling in an ice pond over the weekend, though the exact circumstances were unclear, according to the local fire department.
Several hours away in Austin, Texas, a person died of apparent hypothermia while trying to shelter at an abandoned gas station, authorities said. Other hypothermia deaths were reported from Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Michigan, local media reported.
Almost 200 million Americans remain under some form of winter cold warning at least through February 1.
Forecasters are watching for another possible winter storm to impact the eastern US this weekend, said David Roth, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center.
