Deaths and COVID-19 Deaths (Not required for Spring 2021)

These are year-end figures, so they might not match up with the numbers you heard, say, last week.

Deaths for a country go up every year: bigger population, more deaths. But the U.S. population has been growing by about 2%/yr, so that should be the baseline figure for deaths as well.

Not surprisingly, deaths were way up last year. For the year, the CDC recorded a growth rate for deaths of 18%. Of that, 5% was not attributable to COVID-19.

Why have COVID-19 deaths gone up at all? It's pretty simple really: more opioid abuse is the big one. 

But  not going to the hospital as much, or at all, is another cause. Should those deaths be labeled as COVID-related?? Maybe so. 

And then there are the as yet undiagnosed COVID-19 deaths. Sometimes these take months before they're made official. We don't know how many of those are still out there (this happened to someone I know ... lived alone, found "cold", so low priority ... months later the COVID-19 confirmation was made).

We don't know the extent of these, but even in the 85+ age cohort, deaths from non-COVID-19 reasons are up. It's pervasive.

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So that's the intro. The important parts are that 1) deaths were up across the country in every single age group except babies toddlers, and 2) deaths attributable to COVID-19 were found in every group including babies toddlers.

There's actually a positive part for that. For the 3 groups that are 14 and under, total deaths dropped in spite of there being a handful of COVID-19 deaths. I guess everyone sticking around the house kept the kids safer.

But, of course, the teenagers and young adults fled their homes like crazy (when they could) because parents drive them nuts. So deaths in those groups from non-COVID-19 causes were the big increase.

The transition occurs in middle age. For the age 35-44 cohort, the growth rate is higher for non-COVID-19 deaths, but for the 45-54 cohort it's shifted. 

COVID-19 is often presented, especially by the young, as mostly a threat to seniors. This data shows that this is not the case. The borderline appears to be about 45 (and maybe a year or two higher if we extrapolate from the cohort data). Most people would not even define that threshold as being in late middle age yet.

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Just for perspective, deaths attributable to COVID-19 last year are about 10 times bigger than car accidents, 7 times bigger than opioid abuse, and about 8 time higher than suicides. 

And, don't forget, over 100 times the death from 9/11, over 150 times the deaths from Pearl Harbor, and now every top 10 day in deaths in the U.S. is associated with COVID-19 around this past holiday season (and not with natural disasters or wars).