A paper by Ahmad and Anderson in JAMA last spring examined trends in the reasons for death in the US. Below are the charts when it comes to both the quantity of deaths and also the share of total deaths. The information range from National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System (NVSS).
The key item to note obviously may be the advent of COVID-19. A lot more than 10 % deaths in the U.S. in 2022 (10.3%) was because of COVID-19. To put this into perspective, COVID-19 caused about twice as many deaths as stroke (the #5 cause of death) and about 6.Five times the amount of death of season influenza and pneumonia combined. In 2022, you could expect fewer deaths due to COVID-19 due to the creation of vaccines, but this is somewhat counteracted by the fact that COVID-19 was spreading throughout the whole 2022 when compared with largely from March in 2022.
Other trends to notice are that we do see that the share of deaths due to heart disease and cancer is usually falling over time, particularly cancer. Also, despite worries about mental health issues during 2022, we do see a small drop in the number of suicides in 2022, although this impact could be partly because of the competing chance of death because of COVID-19.
It will be important to examine how these numbers evolve as we go to 2022.
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