Excess Deaths Compared with the Official COVID-19 Mortality Data

According to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on March 31st, COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2020, behind only heart disease and cancer. The CDC extrapolates from past historical trends in weekly deaths to determine the expected number of deaths. This takes into such factors as the number of deaths per year grows slowly over time since the U.S. population increases and growing older. The expected deaths is typically very close to the number of actual deaths. For example, between 2017 and 2019, the difference between expected and actual deaths was less than 4% each year. According to the CDC there were more than 470,000 deaths more than expected in 2020. A comparison of expected and actual deaths for 2020 are shown below.

Excess deaths spiked around the same time as the initial spike in the Spring of 2020 with the outbreak in the Northeastern states. I think it is likely that many of these excess deaths were due to COVID-19 but were categorized as something else. Although I have seen comments that people believe the number of deaths due to COVID-19 is exaggerated, I think that the excess death data indicate just the opposite.

COVID-19 potentially had a secondary impact on excess deaths. Looking at the list of top 10 causes of death in 2020 compared to 2019, there were significant increases in deaths due to diabetes (+15%), unintentional injuries (+11%), as well as smaller increases due to Alzheimer, flu and pneumonia, stroke, and heart disease. When you count the actual numbers, there is a substantial increase. In all these categories together there were an additional 89,000 deaths over 2019, compared to an increase of less than 5,000 from 2018 to 2019. Many of these could be indirectly due to COVID-19. Due to fear of contracting COVID-19, people with some of these conditions may have avoided seeking medical treatment, increasing their risk of dying. The increase in unintentional injuries is interesting – this would include car crashes, which increased significantly in 2020. I have read that one reason for this is that with less traffic, people drove faster, resulting in more crashes.

Also, I have seen comments speculating that suicides would increase during lockdowns, but the data do not support this hypothesis. Deaths by suicide dropped slightly in 2020 and COVID-19 knocked suicide out of the top 10 among causes of death last year.