‘EXCESS DEATHS’ DURING PANDEMIC SURPASSES 1M IN U.S.

The above-normal mortality rate mostly attributed to COVID

The United States has recorded more than 1 million “excess deaths” since the start of the pandemic, government mortality statistics show, a toll that exceeds the officially documented lethality of the coronavirus and captures the broad consequences of the health crisis that has entered its third year.

The excess deaths figure surpassed the milestone last week, reaching 1,023,916, according to Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. The center updates its estimate weekly.

Although the vast majority of the excess deaths are due to the virus, the CDC mortality records also expose swollen numbers of deaths from heart disease, hypertension, dementia and other ailments across two years of pandemic misery.

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 virus emerged in China in late 2019 and began killing people there in January 2020. It did not spread significantly in the United States until that February, and not until the final week of March 2020 did it begin to send the excess deaths metric soaring.

The CDC’s excess deaths tracker shows in graphic detail the speed and intensity of that initial wave: Deaths had soared more than 40 percent above normal nationally in the second week of April 2020.

The lethality was concentrated in a few hot spots: In the second week of April, deaths in New York City were seven times the norm. But some regions had minimal change in mortality for many months.

The CDC mortality branch’s official count of deaths from COVID-19 stood at 911,145 as of Tuesday. The mortality researchers rely on death certificates, and that tally can be slightly lower than other CDC or academic trackers that rely on data from other sources.

Anderson said 91 percent of the deaths from COVID-19 tracked by his unit were attributed directly to the disease. 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, non-coronavirus 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 in a typical year. Deaths from hypertensive disease were nearly 62,000 higher than expected.

Anderson said the numbers carry a degree of ambiguity: Some heart attacks and hypertensive disease could have been associated with undiagnosed cases of coronavirus infections.

The CDC’s analysis estimates 208,431 excess deaths from all the non-COVID-19 causes since the start of the pandemic. At first glance, that number plus the 911,000 COVID-19 deaths would suggest the excess deaths were greater than 1.1 million. But Anderson notes that many of the people who died of COVID-19 were elderly, sick or very frail, and, even without a pandemic, some might not have survived across the two-year span of the pandemic. “Some of those COVID deaths are not, strictly speaking, excess deaths,” he said.

The million-deaths figure highlights the broad reach of the pandemic beyond the direct lethality of the virus itself.

“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 COVID-19, 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.