By Deidre McPhillips, CNN
Covid-19 has killed more than a million people in the United States since the pandemic began, and life expectancy has dropped by about 2. 5 years since 2020.
A very early look at the 2022 data suggests that there were far fewer deaths from covid-19 in the third year of the pandemic than in the first two. More than 267,000 people died from covid-19 in 2022, according to initial data from Johns Hopkins, to more than 350,000 deaths from Covid-19 in 2020 and more than 475,000 deaths from Covid-19 in 2021.
This initial review of knowledge is about deaths reported across states through Jan. 9. The final count will differ from initial knowledge, as states will continue to review the death certificate and refine their reports, and it will be months before the U. S. Centers for Disease is able to review the death certificate. U. S. Control and Prevention frees up initial knowledge of mortality to compare it with other causes of death.
However, despite the decline in deaths, covid-19 will most likely remain the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2022 for the third year in a row.
In 2021, as many years earlier, the leading causes of death in the United States were heart disease and cancer, each of which killed more than 600,000 people. .
If global mortality trends continue into 2022, as they do, it would leave Covid-19 squarely as the third most frequent cause of death.
All death certificates require some degree of subjective interpretation, experts say, and analyzing them takes time. Three years after the pandemic, forensic pathologists and other certifiers are familiar with what constitutes a Covid-19 death, experts say, and real-time knowledge provides an accurate picture of the state of affairs.
But it has been an imperfect science.
“It’s component art, component science,” said Robert Anderson, head of the mortality statistics department at CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. “Sometimes it’s very difficult to figure out the cause of death. “
This is especially true for other people with chronic illnesses.
“Let’s say you have an elderly user with high blood pressure and diabetes, and call your list of life-threatening diseases. It can be very difficult to decide the underlying cause of death,” said Dr. Brown. Joyce deJong, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. “So instead, they just list everything that’s there. And then it’s essentially their complete medical history on the death certificate, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you why they’re dying.
Covid-19 deaths are no exception and, on the contrary, the quality of reports on covid-19 deaths has moved the pandemic forward, according to experts.
“For those of us who certify deaths (classifying covid-19 deaths) is rarely necessarily much more difficult,” said deJong, who is also a medical examiner and medical examiner in Michigan.
There are “gray areas,” he said, similar to when, or if, a user gets tested for covid-19. And there are “reasonable differences in medical opinions” in all cause-of-death reports.
Regarding Covid-19, deJong said, “Maybe you skip some and count too many, but probably most of them are accurate. “
The federal government’s rules on how to report a COVID-19 death have remained largely consistent, however, the strategies used to certify deaths, similar to covid-19 and others, can vary widely from state to state.
Autopsies are used in some cases, but in all; Sometimes a medical examiner certifies a death, other times it may be a medical examiner, and it may be elected officials or Array.
A pre-pandemic CDC report found that more than one-third of death certificates in 2018 indexed an underlying cause of death that was deemed “inappropriate” (data quality is somewhat lacking), at most because of major points such as the location of a cancerous tumor or the type of stroke a user has had.
Anderson says the CDC plans to update that research with more recent knowledge in the near future, but they don’t expect much change.
As for Covid-19, “the more we are informed about the disease, the higher the reports, in my opinion. “
In addition, in some jurisdictions, the existing public fitness emergency similar to Covid-19 triggers an additional point of review of the death certificate that they would not otherwise obtain.
Analysis of trends in excess deaths (the number of deaths beyond what might be expected) also suggests that reporting of COVID-19 deaths has improved. In the early months of the pandemic, there was a sharp increase in deaths attributed to pneumonia, which has since stabilized, he said.
“And that tells me that certifiers now know about Covid and how it’s progressing, and they’re reporting it more correctly,” Anderson said.
Around 7,000 Covid-19 deaths have already been reported in 2023, according to JHU data.
Only 16% of the eligible population has gained their updated booster, which has been shown to reduce the risk of death from covid-19 to a fraction of what it is for other unvaccinated people, and about one in five people in the United States remains absolutely unvaccinated.
El-CNN-Wire™
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