Since the early days of the pandemic, the CDC has publicly tracked what epidemiologists refer to as “excess deaths.” The tracking involves comparing the number of fatalities during the pandemic to number of fatalities before the pandemic. The idea is to try to determine the impact of the pandemic on the number of people dying without trying to determine the actual cause of death which can be difficult and ambiguous, especially when the person dies with co-morbidities.

The CDC recently announced that it was suspending its excess death tracking as of October 12. I think it is likely they did so because, other than a slight blip in August, its tracking has not shown any excess deaths since late January of this year.

The CDC tracking showed that during 2020-2022, the US had about 1.6 million more deaths than would have been expected based on pre-pandemic trends. Regular readers may recall that I disagreed with the CDC’s projections of pre-pandemic trends, arguing that their methodology understated the effects of population growth and an aging demographic. I estimate there were about 1.1 million more deaths in 2020-2022 than we would have expected based on pre-pandemic trends as opposed to the CDC's 1.6 million.  Interestingly, the CDC estimates that about 1.1 million Americans died from COVID.

In any event, we appear to have returned to pre-pandemic fatality rates this year, which is very good news indeed. Through the week ending October 12, there have been about 2.2 million fatalities in the U.S., which is very close to the number of fatalities in early October, 2019.  Reports of fatalities lag by a couple of months so more fatalities will ultimately be reported. Even so, it appears fatalities this year will be very close to the pre-pandemic trendline.

There are still quite a few COVID fatalities being reported. According to the CDC there have been a little over 50,000 so far this year. But the people dying are almost exclusively the elderly. In 2023 so far, 89% of all reported COVID fatalities were over 65 and 71% were over 75. COVID has only accounted for .02% of all fatalities this year. Non-COVID pneumonia has killed over twice as many people.

We will have final 2023 numbers in March next year and I will do an update at that time. However, I thought it was worth noting that the CDC no longer thinks COVID is causing enough fatalities to run an excess death analysis. To me that is a significant milestone.