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Officials said that some of the deaths were caused by hypothermia, while others were related to snow shoveling. Several deaths are still under investigation.

Meanwhile, more than 200 million people are under cold weather alerts due to freezing temperatures expected to last for days. The severe cold is setting new daily low temperature records in higher elevations. As the cold is expected to persist at least through this week, more records are likely to be broken in the South and East.

The most significant infrastructure damage occurred across a large part of the South, where ice made roads slippery, broke tree branches and weighed down power lines. Northern Mississippi and Nashville, Tennessee, in particular, are facing prolonged recovery efforts due to the number of downed trees and power lines.

As of Monday night, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks outages, hundreds of thousands of electricity customers had their power restored, a significant improvement compared to earlier periods when millions were without electricity.

However, more than half a million customers remain without power, including over 190,000 in Tennessee, more than 140,000 in Mississippi and over 100,000 in Louisiana.