- The agency this month quietly updated its provisional death tally.
- But provisional data through October suggests the nation is on track to see at least 105,000 overdose deaths in 2021 — up from 93,000 the year before.
- Those teen overdose deaths were only around 1% of the U.S. total.
The year 2021 was the deadliest in US history, and new data and studies are shedding light on how it got so horrible as reported by AP News.
Increase in deaths
The main reason for the increase in deaths?
COVID-19 said Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work on death statistics.
The agency this month quietly updated its provisional death tally.
“We were wrong, unfortunately,” said Noreen Goldman, a Princeton University researcher.
COVID-19 deaths rose in 2021 — to more than 415,000, up from 351,000 the year before — as new coronavirus variants emerged and an unexpectedly large number of Americans refused to get vaccinated or were hesitant to wear masks, experts said.
Drug overdose
Drug overdose deaths also continued to rise.
New research released Tuesday showed a particularly large jump in overdose deaths among 14- to 18-year-olds.
They almost doubled in 2020, to 954, and the researchers estimated that the total hit nearly 1,150 last year.
Joseph Friedman, a UCLA researcher who was the paper’s lead author, called the spike “unprecedented.”
Those teen overdose deaths were only around 1% of the U.S. total.
Estimates
Experts attributed the spike to fentanyl, a highly lethal drug that has been cut into heroin for several years.
The total number of U.S. deaths often increases year to year as the U.S. population grows.
The CDC has not yet reported its calculation for 2021.
But Goldman and some other researchers have been making their own estimates, presented in papers that have not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals.
Those researchers think U.S. life expectancy dropped another five or six months in 2021 — putting it back to where it was 20 years ago.
Viral transmission
One study looked at death data in the U.S. and 19 other high-income countries.
“What happened in the U.S. is less about the variants than the levels of resistance to vaccination and the public’s rejection of practices, such as masking and mandates, to reduce viral transmission,” one of the study’s authors, Dr Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, said in a statement.
Some experts are sceptical that life expectancy will quickly bounce back.
They worry about long-term complications of COVID-19 that may hasten the deaths of people with chronic health problems.
That’s well below the same period last year, but higher than the comparable period in 2020.
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Source: AP News
