Tracking mortality trends is complex. This post is a forerunner to a larger one I am working on regarding deaths in the US over the last few years. 2025 deaths data has been released in provisional form by the CDC. The working theory since 2020 has been that the epidemic caused “excess” mortality–more people died than would have if pre-existing trends continued; but that some of those deaths were like “pull-forwards”; a lot of older people who weren’t in good health and would have died soon anyway were counted as CV-19 deaths. If that were true, in years after the epidemic had passed, we should begin to see fewer deaths, at least in the older age cohorts.
The 2025 data suggests this may be the case. There were about 3,095,000 deaths in the US in 2025. That is around 8500 deaths a day. (So when someone tries to tell you that an event, like mass vaccinations, is causing a lot of deaths, just remember that this many people die every day, so some people who were vaccinated were going to die on the same day or near the same day.) The rate of deaths was 689 per 100,000 people. That is about a 5% decrease from 2024 and that decrease occurred in all age groups. It is also the lowest death rate ever recorded in the US. (So much for the vax are causing mass cancer and heart deaths in young people nonsense.) The death rate was lowest in children aged 5 to 14, and highest in those 85 and over. Males had a far higher death rate than females, likely due to homicides and overdoses.
The leading causes of death, as they were pre-epidemic, remain heart disease, cancer and unintentional injuries. That unintentional injuries number is frightening, a lot of car accidents, work accidents and overdoses. Heart disease was the primary cause in 695,000 deaths, cancer in 623,000; then it is a big drop to unintentional injuries at 184,000, stroke 171,000, lower respiratory disease (emphysema and asthma) 148,000, diabetes 95,000, flu and pneumonia 56,500, kidney disease 55,000 and chronic liver disease, 52,000. Suicides dropped very slightly to 49,000 and was in 11th place. Looking at these numbers, you can see why there is so much research and treatment focus on heart disease and cancer, which together account for almost 43% of all deaths in the US. Deaths from these two causes increased slightly in 2025 over 2024. (CDC Release)
As I said, much more to come on this topic shortly, but this data strongly suggests that there were some pull-forward deaths during the epidemic years, resulting in lower death rates at this time. I am going to look in more detail at the age group and cause data and will post on that soon.
Curious if you have seen similar data for other countries?
There is a lot of criticism for the US have covid death rate of approx 3600 per 100k vs most of the western European countries that had covid death rates around 2400-2600 covid deaths per 100k.
The purpose of the comparison is that the relative death rates in 2024/2025 may provide insight as to whether there were differences in the methodology in counting covid deaths between difference countries. ie – whether different countries were over counting or under counting covid deaths. I will concede that I would expect the US to have slightly higher covid deaths rates due to a population that has higher rates of unhealthy individuals than most of western Europe. (obesity, diabetes, etc )
thanks for any insight
I think if you adjusted the population for race, age, and especially health status, death rates in developed countries would look pretty similar
I definitely agree with your comment for adjusting for demographics and general health status.
Advocates for single payer health care systems similar to Canada, Germany etc always point to the lower life expectancy in the US. Yet when you adjust for those factors and accidental and other non health related deaths and different counting methodologies, the differences in life expectancy vanishes.
Your comment on the need to drill down into the data and actually “understand ” the data is a very valid point.
A 5% decrease in deaths in all age groups does not sound like a pull forward effect, and certainly not like an effect among the frail elderly. My guess is that the data are not yet complete; that would produce low values across all age groups.
the data is over 99% complete and there are typically very small revisons in the final data. And given the aging of the population we would actually expect to see an increase in the death rate in the very oldest groups. People age up and then die