This is the deadliest year in US history, with more than 3 million dead for the first time, mainly due to the pandemic of the coronavirus. Final death figures for this year won’t be available in the coming months, but preliminary figures suggest the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019.
The number of deaths in the US is increasing most years, so an annual increase in the number of fatalities is expected. But the numbers for 2020 are a jump of about 15% and could go higher if all the deaths from this month are counted.
That would be the largest one-year percentage jump since 1918, when tens of thousands of American soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a flu pandemic. The death rate increased by 46% that year compared to 1917.
COVID-19 killed more than 319,000 Americans, and it still is. Before it came through, there was reason to be hopeful about the death trends in the US.
The nation’s overall death rate has fallen a bit in 2019 due to a decline in heart disease and cancer deaths. And life expectancy has accelerated for the second year in a row – by several weeks – according to death certificate data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But life expectancy for 2020 could drop by three full years, said Robert Anderson of the CDC.
The agency counted 2,854,838 US deaths last year, or nearly 16,000 more than in 2018. That’s pretty good news: the number of deaths usually rises by about 20,000 to 50,000 a year, mainly due to the country’s aging and growing population. .
Indeed, the age-adjusted death rate declined by about 1% in 2019 and life expectancy increased by about six weeks to 78.8 years, the CDC reported.
“It was actually a pretty good year of death,” said Anderson, who oversees the CDC death rates.
The U.S. coronavirus epidemic has been a major driver of deaths this year, both directly and indirectly.
The virus was first identified in China last year and the first cases in the US were reported this year. But it has become the third leading cause of death, only after heart disease and cancer. COVID-19 was the No. 1 killer for certain periods this year.
But some other types of deaths have also increased.
A flare-up of pneumonia cases early this year could have been COVID-19 deaths that were simply not recognized as such at the start of the epidemic. But there has also been an unexpected number of deaths from certain types of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia, Anderson said.
Many of these can also be related to COVID. The virus could have weakened patients already struggling with those conditions, or diminished the care they received, he said.
Early in the epidemic, some were optimistic that the number of deaths in car accidents would decline if people stopped commuting or driving to social events. Data on that is not yet in, but anecdotal reports suggest there was no such decline.
Suicide deaths have fallen in 2019 compared to 2018, but early information suggests they have not continued to decline this year, Anderson and others said.
The number of drug overdose deaths meanwhile got much worse.
Before the coronavirus even arrived, the US was in the middle of the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in its history.
Data for the whole of 2020 is not yet available. But the CDC reported last week that there were more than 81,000 drug overdose deaths in the 12 months ending in May, making this the highest number ever recorded in a one-year period.
Experts think the pandemic disruption of personal treatment and recovery services may have been a factor. People are also more likely to use drugs alone – without the benefit of a friend or family member who can call 911 or administer an overdose-reversing medication.
But perhaps the drugs themselves are a bigger factor: COVID-19 was causing delivery problems for dealers, so they’re increasingly mixing cheap and deadly fentanyl into heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, experts say.
“I don’t think there are a lot of new people who have suddenly started taking drugs because of COVID. I think the supply of people who are already using drugs is more contaminated,” said Shannon Monnat, a Syracuse University researcher who studies trends in overdose. drugs.