NEW YORK (AP) – This is the deadliest year in U.S. history, and deaths are expected to exceed 3 million for the first time, mainly due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Final mortality data for this year will not be available for months. But preliminary figures suggest the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million dead this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019.
Deaths in the United States increase most years, so an annual increase in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 figures equate to a jump of about 15% and could increase once all the deaths this month are counted.
This would mean the biggest percentage jump in a year since 1918, when tens of thousands of American soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a flu pandemic. Deaths increased 46% that year, compared to 1917.
COVID-19 has killed more than 318,000 Americans and counts. Before it happened, there were reasons to have hope about death trends in the United States.
The country’s overall mortality rate fell slightly in 2019, due to the reduction in heart disease and cancer deaths. And life expectancy increased (several weeks) for the second year in a row, according to death certificate data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But life expectancy for 2020 could end up declining to three full years, said Robert Anderson of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC counted 2,854,838 deaths in the United States last year, or nearly 16,000 more than in 2018. That’s good news: deaths typically increase between 20,000 and 50,000 each year, primarily due to aging and growing population of the nation.
In fact, the age-adjusted mortality rate fell by about 1% in 2019 and life expectancy increased by about six weeks to 78.8 years, the CDC reported.
“It was actually a pretty good year for mortality, as things go,” said Anderson, who oversees CDC death statistics.
The American coronavirus epidemic has been a major death toll this year, both directly and indirectly.
The virus was first identified in China last year and the first cases were reported in the United States this year. But it has become the third leading cause of death, just behind heart disease and cancer. During certain periods of this year, COVID-19 was the No. 1 killer.
But some other types of deaths have also risen.
An explosion of pneumonia cases earlier this year may have been the death from COVID-19 that was simply not recognized as such at the beginning of the epidemic. But there have also been an unexpected number of deaths from certain types of heart and circulatory disease, diabetes and dementia, Anderson said.
Many of these, too, may be related to COVID. The virus could have weakened patients who already had problems with these conditions or could have diminished the care they received, he said.
At the start of the epidemic, some were optimistic that deaths from traffic accidents would fall when people stopped moving or driving to social events. There are no data on this yet, but anecdotal reports suggest there was no decline.
Suicide deaths fell in 2019 compared to 2018, but early reports suggest they have not continued to fall this year, Anderson and others said.
Meanwhile, drug overdose deaths got much worse.
Before the coronavirus arrived, the United States was in the midst of the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in its history.
Data for the whole of 2020 are not yet available. But last week, the CDC reported more than 81,000 deaths from drug overdoses during the twelve months ending May, making it the highest number ever recorded in a one-year period.
Experts believe that the disruption of the pandemic in face-to-face treatment and recovery services may have been an important factor. People are also more likely to take drugs alone, without the benefit of a friend or family member who can call 911 or administer medication to reverse the overdose.
But perhaps a more important factor is the drugs themselves: COVID-19 caused supply problems to distributors, so they increasingly mix cheap and deadly fentanyl with heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, experts said.
“I do not suspect that there are a lot of new people who suddenly started using drugs because of COVID. In any case, I think the supply of people who already use drugs is more polluted, ”said Shannon Monnat, a researcher at Syracuse University who studies trends in drug overdoses.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.