Question: Going back to the excess mortality post from earlier in the week, if I remember correctly, and judging by these data on U.S. mortality changes over time, mortality in the United States has been increasing since ~2013. How do the increases in mortality over the COVID period compare with increases in mortality over the last several years? More specifically, I’m thinking that since the UN projected (pre-pandemic) that deaths in the United States in 2020 would be higher than those in 2019, are we really seeing increases that are much bigger than projected?
Answer: We talked about excess deaths in our Q&A of 8/24 (#Excess Mortality), and your question allows us to dig deeper, so let’s do it! Using data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, which collects mortality data for the country, we see that deaths are increasing MUCH faster than in previous years — even with incomplete reports for the first 32 weeks of 2020, deaths are 13% higher than the first 32 weeks of 2019 (Table 1). If we were to use UN World Population Prospects 2019 estimates for the US (which were published in mid-2019, pre-pandemic and use US official estimates of 2016 and 2017 to extrapolate), we would assume the following for 2020:
- Crude death rate: 8.8 per 1,000 individuals
- Total population estimate: 331,003,000
- Total expected deaths for 2020 (52 weeks): 2,912,826
- Total expected deaths for 2020 (32 weeks): 1,792,509
- Difference between expected and realized deaths: 204,550
Table 1. Yearly Deaths in the United States
