The number of ”excess deaths” in the United States last year — the difference between the expected and actual deaths — was the largest in history, largely the result of the fatalities attributed to COVID-19, The New York Times reported Friday.
The death rate increase in 2020 was 16% higher than the previous year, the Times said, greater than the 12% rise from the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1918. Those years were more than double or nearly double the next two closest years: 7% in 1928, 6% in 1936 and 5% in 1922.
A record 3.5 million people died in the United States last year, about 10% of which — or 345,000 — was attributed to COVID-19, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network.
Heart disease remained the single biggest cause of death in the United States, killing nearly 691,000, or twice that of COVID-19, with cancer claiming nearly another 600,000.
In a separate study, the JAMA Network reported that 2.8 million people died in the United States between March 1, 2020, at the start of the outbreak of COVID-19, and Jan. 2, with 522,368 ”excess deaths.”
As the U.S. population has increased over time, so has the number of deaths, but deaths per capita has steadily decreased since 1918. Last year showed the first significant increase in the death rate in more than a century, from 715 deaths per 100,000 in 2019 to 829 per 100,000, which was the highest it’s been since 2003.
The number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 is nearly 595,000 in the United States, according to worldometers.info, still short of the estimated 675,000 attributed to the Spanish flu by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Source: Newmax
