Covid was the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States in 2020

Covid-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2020, replacing unintentional injuries and trailing only heart disease and cancer, federal health researchers reported on Wednesday.

The coronavirus has been the cause of the death of 345,323 Americans in a year that has cost dearly in lives lost. In about 30,000 more cases, death certificates cited Covid-19, but it was not considered the cause of death, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Some 3,358,814 Americans died of all causes in 2020, a 15% increase in the age-adjusted death rate from 2019, when 2,854,838 Americans died. In addition to Covid-19, heart disease claimed more lives than expected last year, as did Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes – a phenomenon statisticians call excessive deaths.

“There are a significant number of excess deaths, beyond what we would expect in a normal year,” said Robert Anderson, head of the mortality statistics division at NCHS and lead author of two reports published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While deaths from heart disease and other illnesses should have increased slightly due to an aging population, “this is much more than we would expect,” Dr Anderson added.

In a second report released on Wednesday, he and his colleagues looked at 378,000 death certificates in 2020 that listed Covid-19 as a factor in determining whether too many deaths had been wrongly attributed to the coronavirus. At the start of the pandemic, testing was sporadic and patients often died from what initially appeared to be unrelated causes, such as heart attacks.

But the researchers found that the virus was actually the underlying cause of death in the vast majority of cases. “Since the start of the pandemic, people have been claiming that deaths are simply attributed to Covid while people are dying from other causes,” Dr Anderson said. “We show that this is not the case.”

Researchers’ review of accompanying conditions on death certificates, such as pneumonia or respiratory failure, and contributing conditions, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, matched what doctors see in patients deceased from Covid-19.

Covid-19 death rates were highest among men; people aged 85 and over; and American Indians, Alaskan Indians and Hispanics. Overall, the highest age-adjusted death rates for all causes were observed among the elderly; Black, Native American or Native Alaskan individuals; and men.