The coronavirus pandemic will make 2020 the deadliest year in US history.
While definitive data won’t be available for months, preliminary figures suggest the US has seen more than 3.2 million deaths this year, which is at least 400,000 more than in 2019 – a figure that could go even higher, according to the Associated Press.
It marks a 15% jump, the largest percentage jump in a year since 1918, when tens of thousands of American soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands died from the Spanish flu.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, COVID-19 claimed 322,849 lives in the US on Wednesday morning, with the country still seeing record highs.
It’s sometimes been the number one killer before heart disease and cancer – and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) believe it could be responsible for much more than those counted so far.
A pneumonia outbreak early this year could have been COVID-19 deaths that simply weren’t recognized as such at the start of the epidemic, according to Robert Anderson, the CDC official who has foreign death statistics.
An unexpected number of deaths from certain types of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia may also be related to the pandemic, attributed to patients already debilitated by those conditions and to reduced care they received due to lockdowns.
Suicide deaths fell in 2019 from 2018, but Anderson said the encouraging trend did not seem to have continued this year, an increase somewhat attributable to the loneliness of lockdowns and exacerbation of existing mental illness.
Meanwhile, drug overdose deaths also appear to have risen – with the 81,000 recorded in the 12 months ending in May, the highest number ever in any one year.
Experts blame the pandemic’s disruption to personal treatment and recovery services, as well as people who abuse drugs while home alone, without anyone being able to call for help.
Perhaps the biggest factor, though, is that COVID-19 caused delivery problems for dealers, increasingly mixing cheap and deadly fentanyl with heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, experts said.
“I don’t think there are a lot of new people who have suddenly started using drugs because of COVID. In any case, I think the supply of people who already use drugs is more contaminated, ”said Shannon Monnat, a researcher at Syracuse University who studies trends in overdose.
With pole wires