COVID-19 still a leading cause of death in ‘22

COVID-19 was the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States last year, dropping from its place as the third-leading cause in 2020 and 2021, when virus fatalities were superseded only by heart disease and cancer, the National Center for Health Statistics reported Thursday.

Unintentional injuries — a category that includes drug overdoses and car accidents — were responsible for more deaths than COVID last year and were the nation’s third-leading cause of death. Deaths from heart disease and cancer both rose in 2022, compared with 2021.

Some 186,702 of the 3.2 million deaths in the United States in 2022 were caused by COVID. The virus contributed to another 58,284 deaths for which it was not deemed the underlying cause. A large proportion of COVID deaths occurred during the first months of 2022.

Altogether, the virus played some role in about a quarter-million deaths last year, a 47 percent decrease from the 462,193 COVID-related deaths in 2021.

The COVID death rate fell by almost half last year, as the age-adjusted figure dropped to 61.3 deaths per 100,000 persons from 115.6 per 100,000 persons in

2021. The data is proof that the pandemic’s toll eased considerably as 2022 wore on.

But the report’s authors noted that even now, COVID is killing Americans in large numbers.

“The death rate went down by a lot, but we also want to emphasize we’re not out of the woods here,” said Dr. Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics.

Nearly 35,000 people have died of COVID this year, he added. The number of total deaths in the United States is still higher than it was before the pandemic, which was 2.9 million, suggesting that COVID has had a broader effect on death rates generally. The outbreak led some people to defer health care and exacerbated other illnesses they might have had.