US deaths this year expected to top 3M for the first time
NEW YORK — This is the deadliest year in U.S. history, with deaths expected to top 3 million for the first time — due mainly to the coronavirus pandemic.
Final mortality data for this year will not be available for months. But preliminary numbers suggest the UnitedStates is ontracktosee more than 3.2 million deaths this year — or at least 400,000 more than in 2019.
U.S. deathsincrease mostyears, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted.
That would mark the largest single-year percentage leap since 1918, when tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a flu pandemic. Deaths rose 46% that year, compared with 1917.
COVID-19 has killed almost 323,000 Americans and counting. Before it came along, there was reason to be hopeful about U.S. death trends.
The nation’s overall mortality rate fell in 2019, duetoreductions in heart disease and cancer deaths. And life expectancy inched up — byseveralweeks—forthesecond straight year, according to death certificate data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But life expectancy for 2020 could end up dropping as much as three years, said RobertAnderson, who over sees death statistics for the CDC.
The U.S. coronavirus epidemic has been a big driver of deaths this year, both directly and indirectly.
The virus was first identified in China last year, and the first U.S. cases were reported this year.
But it has become the third leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer. For certain periods this year, COVID19 was the No. 1 killer.
But some other types of deaths also have increased.
A burst of pneumonia cases early this year may have been COVID-19 deaths that simply weren’t recognized as such early in the epidemic.
But there also have been an unexpected number of deaths from certain types of heart and circulatory diseases, diabetes and dementia, Anderson said.
Many of those, too, may be related to C OVID. The virus could have weakened patients already
struggling with those conditions, or could have diminished the care they were getting, he said.
Early in the epidemic, some were optimistic that car crash deaths would drop as people stopped commuting or driving to social events. Data on that is not yet in, but anecdotal reports suggest there was no such decline.
Deaths by suicide dropped in 2019 compared with 2018, but early information suggests they have not continued to drop this year, Anderson and others said.
Drug overdose deaths, meanwhile, got muchworse.
Before the coronavirus even arrived, the U.S. was in the midst of the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in its history.
Data for all of 2020 is not yet available. But last week the CDC reported more than 81,000 drug overdose deaths in the 12 months ending in May, making it the highest number ever recorded in a one-year period.