A Million Excess Deaths In Less Than Two Years In The U.S.

COVID is currently killing about 2300 people per day in the U.S. and has resulted in more than a million excess U.S. deaths compared to historical norms so far, including 91% where the primary cause of death is designated as COVID, and 9% where another primary cause is listed. Surges in cardiovascular disease deaths, Alzheimer’s disease deaths, and drug overdose deaths account for much of the remaining 9%.

The excess deaths are predominantly among those age 65 and older, and concentrated in the most frail populations within that group. Death rates for middle aged people are very disparate by race and ethnicity.

This article doesn't mention it, but in the post-vaccine period, Republicans have died at a rate of about eight times the rest of the population due mostly to low vaccination rates and secondarily to disregard of measures like masking and social distancing and to failure to obtain medically recognized treatments when they do get sick.

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 it wasn’t until the final week of March 2020 that it began to send the excess-deaths metric soaring. The CDC’s excess deaths tracker shows in detail the speed and intensity of that initial wave: Deaths soared more than 40 percent above normal in the United States in the second week of April 2020. The lethality in early April was concentrated in a few hot spots; for example, 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 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 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 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.

The CDC has found that 74 percent of covid-19 deaths occurred among people age 65 and older. . . . Deaths from Alzheimer’s disease exceeded the expected total by 66,000 during the course of two years. 

. . .

A Washington Post analysis last year found that at the time, in the 40-to-64 age bracket, 1 in 480 Black people, 1 in 390 Hispanic people and 1 in 240 Native Americans had died during the pandemic, compared with 1 in 1,300 White people and Asian people. . . . The United States on the whole has an unusually high rate of chronic health conditions, such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and has a long-recognized “health disadvantage” compared with other wealthy nations. That disadvantage was exacerbated by a weak and scattershot response to the pandemic, Woolf said. Other countries that reacted more quickly or took more aggressive postures to control viral spread early on were able to limit their death toll as well as long-term economic impacts, he said.

From the Washington Post.