U.S. Deaths Dropped 6% Last Year, as COVID Fell From 3rd to 10th Leading Killer

Key Takeaways

• A new report on the leading causes of death for Americans finds COVID-19 dropping to the 10th spot

• Heart disease remains the leading killer, with over 3 million lives lost to the disease last year

• Drug overdose deaths helped push 'unintentional injuries' back to the number 3 spot in 2023

THURSDAY, Aug. 8, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Deaths among Americans dropped by a significant 6.1% between 2022 and 2023, a new government tally finds.

Much of this was due to COVID-19's ebbing effect on deaths.

During the pandemic, over a million Americans lost their lives, and in 2021 it was the third leading cause of death.

However, new data shows that as vaccinations and natural immunity levels rose, the illness had dropped to 10th position in terms of lethality by 2023.

Still, more than 76,000 people lost their lives either directly or indirectly from COVID last year, so it remains a dire threat, concluded a team of researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nevertheless, that's a nearly 69% decline compared to the nearly 246,000 lives lost to COVID in 2022.

The pandemic's impact on U.S. mortality has changed, concluded a team led by Farida Bhuiya Ahmad , of the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.

"In 2020, COVID-19 altered the rankings of leading causes of death substantially. The mortality burden of COVID-19 has decreased since then," the researchers said.

Her team looked at U.S. death data for the years 2019 through 2023, compiled by the U.S. National Vital Statistics System.

The leading cause of death by far during all those years was heart disease, which in 2019 killed nearly 2.85 million Americans.

That number rose during the pandemic, to almost 3.7 million deaths in 2021, before subsiding back to pre-pandemic levels at just over 3 million deaths in 2023.

Cancer kept its number two spot, killing between 650,000 and 700,000 people annually between 2019 and 2023, Ahmad's team found.

"The cancer death rate declined steadily from pre-pandemic rates, except for a brief increase in 2021," the researchers wrote.

In 2023, "unintentional injuries" returned to the third spot on the list of leading killers, as COVID fell from third to 10th position.

"Unintentional injuries" includes drug overdose deaths.

"The death rate due to unintentional injuries increased 26.3% from 2019 [173,040 deaths] to 2023 [222,518 deaths], largely due to a substantial increase in drug overdose deaths," the CDC team noted.

The seven other leading causes of deaths for Americans in 2023 were: stroke (162, 639 deaths), chronic lower respiratory diseases, including COPD (145,350), Alzheimer's disease (114,034), diabetes (95,181), kidney disease (55,250), chronic liver disease/cirrhosis (52,220), and COVID-19 (49,928).

Ahmad and colleagues noted that deaths linked to diabetes and liver disease are both rising steadily.

Suicide was the 11th leading cause of death for Americans in 2023, and numbers have been rising, from 47,511 in 2019 to 49,303 lives lost in 2023.

Suicides do seem to be trending downward, however.

"Suicide was the 10th leading cause of death in 2019 and prior years, but has not ranked in the top 10 causes since 2020," the researchers reported.

The findings were reported Aug. 8 in two studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and in the CDC journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

More information

Find out how you can shield yourself from the number one killer, heart disease, at the American Heart Association .

SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association and Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Aug. 8, 2024

What This Means For You

COVID-19 has lost much of its lethality since the pandemic, but still killed nearly 50,000 Americans in 2023.