Health officials in the US say 2021 is on track to surpass last year as the deadliest year on record.
Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) death statistics, said available data shows 2021 is likely to surpass last year’s record number of deaths by at least 15,000.
However, death reports for November and December will not be in for many weeks.
Last year was the most lethal in US history, due largely to the Covid-19 pandemic. A CDC report being released on Wednesday shows 2020 was actually even worse than the agency previously reported.
The report presents a final tally for last year of about 3.384 million US deaths, about 25,000 more than a provisional count released earlier this year.
An exhibition of white flags representing Americans who have died of Covid-19, placed over 20 acres of the National Mall, in Washington, U.S.
Joshua Roberts
Such jumps between provisional and final numbers are common, but 2020’s difference was higher than usual because of a lag in death records from some states that switched to new electronic reporting systems, Mr Anderson said.
The CDC this week also revised its estimate of life expectancy for 2020. Life expectancy at birth that year was 77 years, a decrease of 1.8 years from 2019. The agency previously estimated the decline at 1.5 years.
Mr Anderson said it is likely that the nation will see more than 3.4 million deaths in 2021. Other experts said they think deaths for the year will end up either about the same as in 2020, or higher.
A large reason is Covid-19, which hit the US hard around March 2020 and became the nation’s No. 3 cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer.
Last year, Covid-19 was the underlying cause in about 351,000 deaths. This year, the number is already at 356,000, and the final tally could hit 370,000, Mr Anderson said.
Experts also think the 2021 numbers will be affected by a drug overdose epidemic that is expected to — for the first time — surpass 100,000 deaths in a calendar year.
An increase in annual deaths is not unusual. The annual count rose by nearly 16,000 from 2018 to 2019 — before Covid-19 appeared.
But the pandemic clearly had an impact. The nation had the smallest population gain rate in history between July 2020 and July 2021, primarily because of the Covid-19 deaths, said Kenneth Johnson, a University of New Hampshire researcher.
Officials had hoped vaccines would slash the death count, but many Americans have chosen not to get vaccinated. The CDC says 204 million Americans are fully vaccinated — or about 65% of the US population that are aged 5 and older and eligible for jabs.