Slideshow: COVID-19’s Impact on the Leading Causes of Death in the US
Experts analyzed data from the National Center for Health Statistics on the leading causes of death in the US from the last 5 years.
Although the initial COVID-19 outbreak of 2020 is now beyond the point of mass mortalities across the US, the pandemic’s effect on the leading causes of death in the country has been noticeable across mortality statistics from 2020 through 2023. While changes in the causes of death in the US have remained relatively stable throughout history, the pandemic put an end to that trend and researchers attempted to measure the full extent of its effect.
After gathering death certificate data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System for the years 2019 to 2023, researchers broke down the trends in leading causes of death in the US from the past 5 years.
“Deaths due to unintentional injuries ranked next highest until 2020-2021 when COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death. In 2022, COVID-19 moved to [the] fourth rank and, in 2023, COVID-19 is projected to be the tenth leading cause of death,” wrote authors of an article published in JAMA.1
From the common pre-2020 trends to a shift by 2022 and in subsequent years, researchers explored some of the key highlights of recently gathered statistics from 2019 to 2023 and published their interpretation of the data in a JAMA article. Explore this year-by-year breakdown in the leading causes of death to better understand COVID-19’s overall role regarding mortality rates in the US.
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