At least two people have died as a massive winter storm and frigid temperatures swept across the United States late this week and into the weekend, officials said.

Two men died from hypothermia in Caddo Parish, in the Shreveport area, the Louisiana Department of Health said in a news release. Further details about the victims were not released.

Winter Storm Fern has brought multiple inches of snow and ice as well as dangerously frigid temperatures to giant swaths of the country.

New York City officials suspect the weather could be to blame for the deaths of five people there this weekend, WABC reported. The victims were found on Saturday, Jan. 24, in Brooklyn, Manhattan and in Queens.

(Authorities told PEOPLE they could not confirm if the storm was connected.)

An arctic air mass helped fuel the storm that stretched from the Central and Southern Plains to the East Coast, with winter weather beginning on Friday, Jan. 23, and now expected to continue into the Northeast until Monday, Jan. 26.

The storm has churned to the north and east, dropping snow in states like Arkansas, Kansas, Maryland and Oklahoma and bringing freezing rain and ice to Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas and elsewhere.

The low temperatures enveloping much of the country are due to a polar vortex that started to dip down into the U.S. last week.

Before the storm began, AccuWeather chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter warned that hundreds of thousands of people could possibly “go without electricity and heat for days” as a result of the system.

AccuWeather meteorologist Emma Belscher also noted that “some locations will be slow to rise above freezing” after the storm pushed through. “This will prolong impacts,” she said, “as snow and ice will not be quick to melt and can easily refreeze overnight.”

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Several major metro areas have been impacted by Winter Storm Fern so far, including Dallas, Austin, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Boston, according to AccuWeather.

NBC News reported that weather alerts stretched over 37 states and 190 million people and some 875,000 customers were dealing with outages from Texas to West Virginia, according to PowerOutage.us.