The highest death toll from a single tornado was about 1300 in a tornado in Bangladesh. Accurate records are not available for most countries, but in the U.S. tornadoes have killed over 19,000 people...
There were a total of 1,817 tornadoes in the U.S. in 2004 of which 20 were killers. These tornadoes claimed a total of 36 lives. The deadliest of these was an F3 in Illinois that killed 8.