Total 2022 U.S. Deaths Up About 15% Over Pre-Pandemic Level

U.S. public health agencies recorded a total of about 3.2 million deaths in 2022, according to full-year mortality figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The total number of deaths was down 7% from the preliminary total for 2021 that the CDC reported a year earlier, but it was 15% higher than the preliminary, full-year average — about 2.8 million per year — for the period from 2015 through 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Methods

The new 2022 death total is based on the mortality figures the CDC uses to calculate whether the number of deaths caused by COVID-19, influenza and other, similar upper respiratory infections has exceeded the epidemic threshold for a given week.

The total figures include deaths caused by COVID-19 and by many other causes, including flu, cancer, heart diseases and any harm caused by efforts to prevent and treat COVID-19.

The CDC posts each data set used in those calculations separately on the web, meaning that agents and advisors can adjust for state death reporting delays by comparing sets of CDC mortality data posted at the same point in each year.

COVID-19 vs. Flu

State-level mortality figures tend to take about four to five weeks to firm up, and cause-of-death figures may take even longer to gel. But the latest epidemic threshold chart data set, which was posted Friday, suggests that physicians are still listing COVID-19 as a cause of death much more often than they are listing flu as the cause of death.

The CDC recorded a total of about 240,000 COVID-19 in 2022 and only 7,819 flu deaths for the year, even though the flu death total soared above 700 per week during every week in December 2022, according to the CDC epidemic threshold chart data set.

Total excess deaths spiked in January and remained significantly higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic started for the rest of the year. (Photo: Ross Todd/ALM)