COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in Americans between March 2020 and October 2021, accounting for one in eight deaths.
In that time frame, COVID-19 ranked in the top five causes of death for every age group of people over 15. Between January and October 2021, pandemic disease was the leading cause of death among people aged 45 to 54.
That’s according to a study of national death certificate data published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine by researchers at the National Institutes of Health.
The study found that COVID-19 caused about 700,000 deaths between March 2020 and October 2021. The pandemic disease trailed only heart disease and cancer, which caused about 2.15 million collectively in that time period. The fourth and fifth leading causes of death in the US were accidental deaths—including traffic accidents, overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths—and stroke, which collectively caused about 624,000 deaths during that period.
The authors, led by Meredith Shiels, an expert in cancer epidemiology and genetics at the National Cancer Institute, divided the time frame into two sections: the start of the pandemic in March 2020 to December 2020 and January 2021 to October 2021. the last month for which full data was available. This revealed age-related trends, likely due in part to uptake of vaccines and other mitigation efforts.
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In 2020, COVID-19 was the second leading cause of death in people aged 85 and over, but amid high vaccine uptake in this age group, it fell to the third leading cause of death from January to October 2021 .
Younger adults saw the opposite trend. For those aged 45 to 54, COVID-19 was the fourth leading cause of death in 2020, but rose to the leading cause of death in 2021. Similarly, for those aged 35 to 44, COVID-19 jumped from fifth leading cause of death in 2020 to second leading cause in 2021. For both 15 to 24 and 25 to 34 year olds, COVID-19 was not in the top five in 2020, but ranked as the fourth leading cause of death in both age groups in 2021.
For people aged 55 to 84, COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in both time periods.
The study is limited by the possibility of misclassification of deaths on death certificates. But the authors were careful to choose a time frame that would limit interim or missing data from skewing the findings. This meant, however, that the study did not include deaths from part of the delta wave or the towering micron wave in January 2022. As of October 2021, about 300,000 additional people in the US have died from COVID-19.
