COVID falls out of top 5 causes of death for 1st time since pandemic: CDC

COVID-19 has significantly fallen as a leading cause of death in the U.S. for the first time since the pandemic began, according to new provisional data published Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In 2023, the virus was the tenth-leading cause of death among Americans, down from the fourth-leading cause in 2022 and the third-leading cause of death between March 2020 and October 2021 .

The report also found that overall deaths fell significantly from 2022 to 2023.

The report did not go into reasons for why deaths have fallen, but Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital and an ABC News contributor, said likely reasons include the prevention of COVID fatalities through vaccines, treatments for early onset illness and a better overall understanding of the virus.

"Being on the other side of the pandemic played a big part in seeing this overall mortality rate go down," he said. 'This is, in large part, related to the public health effort, especially vaccines that, of course, saved so many lives."

For the report, researchers looked at preliminary death certificate data from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics' (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System.

In 2023, there were about 3.09 million deaths in the U.S. with an age-adjusted rate of 750.4 deaths per 100,000 people. This is a decrease of 6.1% from the rate of 798.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2022.

Additionally, death rates were highest among males, older adults and Black Americans, according to the report.

The three leading causes of death in the U.S. were heart disease, cancer and unintentional injury, respectively, which is unchanged from 2022.

Last year marked the first time since the pandemic began that COVID-19 was not one of the top five leading causes of death. Provisional data showed COVID-19 was the underlying cause for 1.6% of all deaths in 2023, decreasing from 5.7% in 2022.

The COVID-19 death rate fell from 58.7 per 100,000 deaths in 2022 to 18.2 per 100,000 in 2023, the report found.

The number of COVID-19-associated deaths fell from 2023 across all age groups and racial/ethnic groups.

Death rates from COVID-19 were highest among those aged 75 and older -- highlighting the impact the virus has had on the elderly population. However, the gap between death rates among racial/ethnic groups shrunk from 2022 to 2023.

In 2022, the COVID death rate for white Americans was 58.6 per 100,000 compared to 71.0 per 100,000 for Black Americans. In 2023, the rate was 19.6 per 100,000 for white Americans and 17 per 100,000 for Black Americans.

"Because of the wide disparities that exist in COVID-related deaths, and we know that COVID deaths were not equal across the population, especially hit…Black populations and other and African American people, it's not surprising that when you overall reduce COVID deaths, that will overall contribute to potentially sort of a closing of the gap," Brownstein said.

He added that there is more work to be done to close the gap even further, including providing access to health care and insurance for traditionally underserved populations.

Brownstein also said he hopes more efforts can be made to reduce deaths from traditional leading causes of death such as heart disease and cancer.

"We've made a big dent in COVID as a result of response efforts," he said. "But now there's still such an important effort to deal with some of these other leading causes of death. These data are important because they can help from an awareness perspective and an allocation of research resources."