As I continue to work my way through a backlog of studies on trends in deaths largely during the epidemic period, here is one attempting to ascertain excess mortality by cause in the US during the epidemic. Interestingly, the authors are from the UK. The authors look at CDC data on deaths of persons aged 15 and over for deaths from March 2020 through 2022 for eight causes: accidents, cardiovascular, cancer, diabetes, flu, pneumonia, drug and alcohol overdoses, suicide and the rest, which includes CV-19. Fifteen year age groups were used, which I think is a little too wide. And only a five-year baseline period was used, which is inadequate to identify true long-term trends by cause and other factors, like age and sex.
In total, the researchers estimated their were 1.3 million excess deaths during the study period. Supposedly there were 1,172,000 deaths in the US attributable to CV 19 through January of 2024 and 950,000 during the study period, so around 350,000 excess deaths in the study period were not related to CV-19. While many researchers say CV-19 deaths are undercounted, but I think the opposite is true, many deaths were ascribed to CV-19 when it had only a peripheral involvement. Excluding CV-19, the largest contributors were heart disease at 116,000, substance abuse at 87,000, and 41,300 due to diabetes.
As you might expect, the pattern of excess deaths early in the epidemic was almost entirely due to CV-19, offset by reductions in other respiratory virus-related deaths. Later on, I believe due to the lockdowns and terror campaign and other social disruptions, missed-health care-related deaths, like those for heart disease and diabetes, along with overdoses, became more prominent in the excess death toll. While the largest absolute number of excess deaths was among the old, the largest percent change was among younger adults aged 30 to 44. There are good charts in the study which help visualize trends during the study period. (Medrxiv Paper)
