The United States has recorded over 1 million excess deaths since February 2020 linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to federal data.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted more than 1,045,000 excess deaths, a metric used in epidemiology that takes the number of people who die from any cause in any given region and period and then compares it with a historical baseline from recent years. It estimates the number of deaths from all causes during a crisis that goes beyond what would be expected under normal conditions.
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The vast majority of the excess deaths were due to COVID-19, but the CDC pointed to several other health conditions that contributed to the high mortality, such as hypertension, ischemic heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes.
For instance, CDC data show that an extra 63,000 people have died since February 2020 of hypertensive diseases and that more than 67,000 people have died due to Alzheimer’s or dementia-related illnesses.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Robert Anderson, chief of the CDC’s mortality statistics branch, told the Washington Post.
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Measuring excess deaths provides a better perspective of the widespread damage caused by the pandemic. It is able to compensate for gaps in the data caused by underreporting. For instance, many death certificates that would in normal circumstances say a person died of COVID-19 do not simply because the person was not confirmed coronavirus-positive when they were alive. A wide gap in test availability in the first years of the pandemic made reliable case reporting difficult.
The CDC’s separate count of COVID-19 deaths stands at 920,000.
