But don’t expect that good news to be repeated in 2020. 

The impact of COVID-19 and other ills are projected to boost the death rate by 15% to exceed 3 million deaths for the first time in U.S. history, according to the Associated Press. 

COVID-19 has already killed more than 318,000 Americans.

According to the AP,  preliminary data suggest a year-end total for 2020 of more than 3.2 million U.S. deaths. That would be a new record and represent 400,000 more deaths than were recorded for 2019.

The news agency noted that the rise from 2019 to 2020 marks the biggest such jump since 1918-1919, when deaths soared due a combination of fatalities from World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. That remains the record period for any one-year uptick in American deaths, with fatalities rising by 46%, the AP reported.

This year’s big rise in death comes after a welcome rise in Americans’ life expectancy during 2019, according to new data for last year, issued on Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The agency reported a record number of deaths nationwide in 2019 — 2,854,838, up 15,633 from 2018, which is expected as population rises. But life expectancy actually rose by 0.1 year, so that the average American had a life expectancy in 2019 of 78.8 years. 

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Put another way, the age-adjusted death rate fell from 723.6 deaths per 100,000 population in 2018 to 715.2 in 2019.

However, “I would expect this to reverse in 2020, due to COVID, as well as the increases in deaths due to disrupted medical and social services from the pandemic,” said Dr. Eric Cioe-Peña, director of Global Health at Northwell Health in New Hyde Park, N.Y. He wasn’t involved in the new CDC reports.

For 2019, the reports from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics showed that heart disease remained the No. 1 killer, claiming 659,041 lives, followed by cancer (599,601 deaths), and accidents/unintentional injuries (173,040 deaths).

In some good news, suicides fell from 48,344 in 2018 to 47,511 in 2019, and the suicide rate also declined, from 14.2 per 100,000 in 2018 to 13.9 in 2019. 

Source – https://www.newsmax.com/

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