The United States now has recorded more than 1 million "excess deaths" since the start of the pandemic.
"We've never seen anything like it," Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) National Center for Health Statistics, told the Washington Post.
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Although the vast majority of the excess deaths are from the virus, CDC mortality records also expose increased numbers of deaths from heart disease, hypertension, dementia, and other ailments across two years of the pandemic. In 2019, before the pandemic, the CDC recorded 2.8 million deaths. But in 2020 and 2021, as the virus spread through the population, the country recorded roughly a half-million deaths each year in excess of the norm.
The CDC mortality branch's official count of deaths from Covid-19 stood at 911,145 as of Tuesday. (Mortality researchers rely on death certificates, and that tally can be slightly lower than other CDC or academic trackers who rely on data from other sources.) Ninety-one percent of tracked deaths from Covid-19 were attributed directly to the disease, Anderson said. In the other 9 percent of deaths, Covid-19 was listed as a contributing factor but not the primary cause.
The CDC documented 13 other types of non-Covid causes of death that were inflated during the pandemic compared with historical trends starting in 2013. For example, since the start of the pandemic, the category of ischemic heart disease has recorded an additional 30,000 deaths beyond what would be expected. Deaths from hypertensive disease were nearly 62,000 higher than expected.
"The bulk of the excess deaths were a direct result of Covid-19 infections, but pandemics have major cascading impacts on all aspects of society," said Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
He cited many health impacts beyond the coronavirus, including a sharp rise in drug overdoses as people with opioid use disorder struggled to get treatment or used drugs in isolation, and a drop in cancer screenings, such as mammograms and colonoscopies. The CDC previously reported that more than 93,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2020, a record number that far surpassed deaths from homicide and traffic accidents combined.
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Alan Goforth
Alan Goforth is a freelance writer in suburban Kansas City. In addition to freelancing for several publications, he has written a dozen books about sports and other topics.
