U.S. Mortality Is Still High — And It's Not Just COVID

Drug overdose deaths are combining with COVID-19 to increase mortality in the United States. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 739,429 deaths during the first 12 weeks of the year. That was 0.01% higher than in the first quarter of 2023, and it was 8.9% higher than in the first quarter of 2019, before COVID-19 came to light, according to a comparison of the latest early CDC numbers that come with the weekly Flu View reports and the Flu View numbers released at the same point in 2023 and 2019. For a look at the 12 states with biggest increase in deaths since 2019, based on state figures given in the latest CDC report, see the gallery above. The CDC report compares incomplete 2024 state numbers with incomplete 2019 numbers. As the year goes on and more state death figures come in, the 2024 death counts will get higher, and comparisons of the 2024 numbers and the 2019 numbers will look worse. For a table for all 50 states and some other jurisdictions, see the table below. What it means: Mortality may be starting to settle down, but it's still running high. The reasons: The United States counted about 43,000 more deaths in the latest quarter than in the comparable period in 2019. State and local public health agencies attributed about 19,400 of the deaths they recorded to COVID. In 2019, COVID was unknown, and no officials counted it as a cause of death. Now another data set, which gives monthly drug overdose death counts, shows that the United States is now reporting an average of about 27,000 drug overdose deaths per quarter, up from about 16,000 per quarter in 2019. That means drug overdose deaths contributed to about 9,000 of the increase in the total number of first-quarter deaths.