According to a new study, it is likely that excess deaths from chronic illnesses and other natural causes were driven by COVID-19 infections, contradicting claims that attributed these deaths to factors such as COVID vaccinations and shelter-in-place policies.
Official federal counts state that nearly 1,170,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19, but various excess mortality studies suggest that these numbers are significantly undercounted. However, until now, there has been little evidence as to whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus contributed to these additional deaths.
The new study compared reported COVID-19 deaths to excess deaths due to non-COVID natural causes and found that increases in non-COVID excess deaths occurred around the same time or before increases in reported COVID-19 deaths in most US counties. This suggests that many of these excess deaths were uncounted COVID-19 deaths.
The study’s findings show that many COVID-19 deaths went uncounted during the pandemic, and surprisingly, these undercounts persisted well beyond the initial phase of the pandemic. The researchers observed peaks in non-COVID excess deaths in the same or prior month as COVID-19 deaths, which indicates unrecognized COVID-19 deaths missed due to low community awareness and a lack of COVID-19 testing.
The study utilized novel statistical methods to analyze monthly data on natural-cause deaths and reported COVID-19 deaths for 3,127 counties over the first 30 months of the pandemic. The researchers estimated that 1.2 million excess natural-cause deaths occurred in US counties during this time period, and about 163,000 of these deaths did not have COVID-19 listed on the death certificates.
The geographical patterns of these deaths show that the gap between non-COVID excess deaths and reported COVID-19 deaths was largest in nonmetropolitan counties, the West, and the South. Conversely, metropolitan areas in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states were the only areas to report more COVID-19 deaths than non-COVID excess deaths.
The researchers hope that this new data will encourage future analyses using hospitalizations and other local data to continue to differentiate uncounted COVID-19 deaths from excess natural-cause and external deaths. The study was coauthored by researchers at several institutions, including Boston University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington School of Public Health, and the University of California, San Francisco.
