In recent years, China has experienced frequent catastrophic earthquakes, causing huge casualties. If the death toll can be quickly predicted after a disaster, then relief supplies can be delivered in a timely and reasonable manner, and the death toll and property losses can be minimized. Therefore, rapid and effective prediction of earthquake deaths plays a key role in guiding post-earthquake emergency rescue. However, there are many factors affecting the number of deaths in an earthquake. Aimed at this issue, a prediction model for earthquake deaths based on extreme learning machine (ELM) optimized by principal component analysis (PCA) and beetle antennae search (BAS) algorithm has been proposed in this study. Firstly, this study selected sample data of destructive earthquakes in mainland China in the past 50 years, then PCA was used to reduce the dimensionality of the factors affecting earthquake deaths, the principal components with lower contribution rates were removed, and the principal components with higher contribution rates were used as the input variables of ELM. Meanwhile, the earthquake deaths were used as the output variable, and the connection weights and thresholds of ELM was optimized using BAS. Finally, the prediction model for earthquake deaths based on PCA-BAS-ELM was established. The established model was used to predict the test samples. The results showed that the prediction results of PCA-BAS-ELM model had a higher fit with the actual values, and its mean square error, mean absolute percentage error and root mean square error were 2.433, 2.756% and 5.443, respectively, which suggested higher prediction accuracy.