NEW YORK (AP) – 2021 is the deadliest year in U.S. history, and new data and research offer more insight into how serious it can be.
The main cause of the increase in mortality? COVID-19, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the work of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on death statistics.
The agency quietly resumed the provisional death rate this month. It showed 3.465 million people died last year, which is about 80,000 more than the 2020 record.
Earlier last year, some experts were hoping that 2021 would not be as bad as the first year of the pandemic, in part because effective vaccines against COVID-19 were finally available.
“Unfortunately, we were wrong,” said Norin Goldman, a researcher at Princeton University.
Covid -19 mortality will rise in 2021 – more than 415,000 from last year’s 351,000 – as new variants of the coronavirus emerge and a sudden number of Americans refuse to be vaccinated or are reluctant to wear masks. , say experts.
Coronavirus is not the only culprit. Preliminary data from the CDC also shows that cancer death rates have risen slightly, and rates are still rising in diabetes, chronic liver disease, and stroke.
The death toll from drug overdoses has also increased. The CDC does not yet have overdose death statistics for 2021, as identifying them could take several weeks of lab work and investigation. But provisional data in October suggests the country is on track to see at least 105,000 overdose deaths in 2021, up from 93,000 last year.
A new study released Tuesday showed a particularly large increase in overdose mortality among teens between the ages of 14 and 18.
The number of overdose deaths in adults has been relatively consistent for most of the last decade, around 500 years, according to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They nearly doubled in 2020, to 954, and researchers estimate that last year’s total reached nearly 1,150.
Joseph Friedman, a UCLA researcher who co-authored the paper, called the peak “unprecedented”.
Teen overdose deaths account for only 1% of the United States total. But teens have seen a larger relative increase than the general population, although surveys suggest that drug use among teens is declining.
Experts call fentanyl an extremely deadly drug that has been addicted to heroin for several years. Recently, counterfeit pills, such as prescription drugs that are sometimes abused by adults, have also been caught.
The total death toll in the United States tends to rise annually as the U.S. population increases. But in 2020 and 2021 there was an unusual increase in mortality and rates, mainly due to the pandemic.
National mortality trends affect life expectancy, an estimate of the average life expectancy of a child born this year.
With rare exceptions, life expectancy in the United States has reliably increased each year. But the CDC’s estimated life expectancy for 2020 is approximately 77 years, a year and a half shorter than in 2019.
The CDC has not yet made the 2021 calculation. But Goldman and several other researchers are making their own assessments, presented in articles not yet published in peer-reviewed journals.
These researchers think that life expectancy in the United States will be reduced by another five to six months in 2021, returning to where it was 20 years ago.
Goldman said the loss of more than two years of life expectancy over the past two years was “mammoth”.
One study looks at data on deaths in the United States and 19 other high-income countries. The worst has been experienced by the United States.
“What has happened in the United States is less about options than the level of resistance to vaccination and the public’s rejection of practices like masks and warrants to reduce virus transmission,” Drs. Stephen Wolfe, co-author of the study for the community. of Virginia. – This was said in the university communiqué.
Some experts doubt that life expectancy will return quickly. They are saddened by the long-term complications of COVID-19, which can accelerate the deaths of people with chronic health problems.
Preliminary – and incomplete – data from the CDC suggests that at least 805,000 people died in the United States in the first three months of this year. This is lower than the same period last year, but higher than the comparable period of 2020.
“We can get to the‘ new normal ’, which is slightly higher than before,” Anderson said.
The Associated Press Department of Health and Science receives support from the Science Education Department of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. AP is solely responsible for all content.
Source: Huffpost
