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Deaths in the US in 2020

By June 27, 2021Commentary

The Society of Actuaries studies death patterns in the US.  This information is used by life and health insurance companies and others who need to know how long people might live and what they might die from.  So 2020 becomes an interesting year and here is the latest report from SOA on 2020.  (SOA Report)   The analysis is somewhat hindered by incomplete data for the important categories of suicide and drug overdoses.  First of all, from 2000 to 2019, US mortality rates, expressed as deaths per 100,000 population steadily fell and the population aged, creating ample opportunity for a lethal respiratory pathogen.  In 2020, the mortality rate was 830.5 per 100,000, up 16% from 2019.  CV-19 was so bad, this must be the worst death rate in a century, right, but guess what, that is back to the same rate in 2003, less than 20 years ago.  A lot of frail vulnerable adults died.

If you excluded CV-19 deaths, we still had a rise of 4.4% year-over-year in mortality.  Now there are those who say maybe we missed some CV-19 deaths, but given the attribution method, it is far more likely that we over-counted CV-19.  And when you look by age and by cause you see the real truth.  The terror campaign killed a lot of young people.  For non-CV deaths the highest increase was among people aged 15 to 44, and they weren’t dying of CV-19.  Missed health care, overdoses and suicide were the causes.  Deaths from heart disease, which have shown dramatic declines every year for two decades, were up by 3.4%, deaths from diabetes, liver disease and hypertension increased over 11%.  Drug overdose and homicide deaths were also much higher.

Here is how dramatic the impact of non-CV-19 deaths was in younger age-groups.  For those aged 5 to 14, deaths increased by 2.2%, of that 1.5 percentage points was non-CV-19.  Ages 15-24, a 20.4% increase in deaths, 18.7 of those percentage points were non-CV-19, or over 90% of all the increase in deaths.  Ages 25-34, a 23.5% increase in deaths, 19.7 of those percentage points were non-CV-19, again over 90%.  Ages 35 to 44, 24.1% increase in deaths, 16.9 of the percentage points were non-CV-19.   The terror campaign and lockdowns killed a lot of young adults and children, far, far more than CV-19 did.

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