United States: A new government report shows the ultimate deaths in the U.S. decreased by almost six percent between the past years 2022 and 2023. This drop is largely because COVID-19 had a smaller impact on deaths. During the pandemic, over a million Americans died, and in 2021, COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death.
Shifting Leading Causes of Death
As reported by HealthDay, thanks to vaccinations and natural immunity, it had dropped to the 10th leading cause. Despite this improvement there is COVID-19 still out there and caused more than 76,000 deaths last year, making it a continuing threat according to researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nevertheless, that’s nearly 69% decline compared to the nearly 246,000 lives lost to COVID in the year 2022.
And the pandemic’s impact on the U.S. mortality has almost changed and concluded a team led by Farida Bhuiya Ahmad of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
“In 2020, COVID-19 altered the rankings of which leading causes of death substantially. The mortality burden of COVID-19 has decreased since then,” the researchers said.
Her team looked at U.S. death data for the years 2019 through 2023, compiled by the U.S. National Vital Statistics System.
The leading cause of death by far during all those years was heart disease, which in 2019 killed nearly 2.85 million Americans.
Other Trends in U.S. Mortality
That number rose during the pandemic, to almost 3.7 million deaths in 2021, before subsiding back to pre-pandemic levels at just over 3 million deaths in 2023.
Cancer kept the number two spot killing between 650,000 and almost 700,000 people yearly in the past few years founded by Ahmad’s Team and also the cancer death rates decline steadily from before pandemic except for a brief increase in 2021 said the researchers wrote.
In 2023, “unintentional injuries” returned to the third spot on the list of leading killers, as COVID fell from third to 10th position.
“Unintentional injuries “which includes the drug overdose deaths.
“The death rate due to actually very unintentional injuries that increased 26.3 percent from 2019 173,040 deaths to 2023 222,518 deaths, largely due to the very frequent increase in drug overdose deaths,” the CDC team noted.
Ahmad and some of his colleagues noted that the deaths linked to the diabetes and liver disease are both rising at a constant rate.
“Suicide was the only 10th leading cause of death in 2019 and prior years but has not ranked in the top 10 causes since 2020,” the researchers reported.
