COVID-19, overdose has pushed the United States to the highest death toll ever

New York-2021 is the deadliest year in US history, and new data and research provide more insight into how it has deteriorated.

What is the main reason for the increase in deaths? COVID-19 says Robert Anderson, who oversees the work on mortality statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency quietly updated the provisional death count this month. Last year, the death toll was 3,465,000, about 80,000 higher than the record total for 2020.

Earlier last year, some experts were optimistic that 2021 wouldn’t be as bad as the first year of the pandemic. This is partly due to the finally availability of an effective COVID-19 vaccine.

“Unfortunately, we were wrong,” said Noreen Goldman, a researcher at Princeton University.

According to experts, the death toll of COVID-19 was 415,000 in 2021 due to the emergence of a new variant of the coronavirus, which unexpectedly refused vaccination and hesitated to wear masks. It exceeded the number of people and increased from 351,000 in the previous year.

It’s not just because of the coronavirus. Preliminary CDC data also show a slight increase in crude cancer mortality and continued increase in diabetes, chronic liver disease, and stroke mortality.

Deaths from drug overdose continued to increase. The CDC has not yet aggregated deaths from overdose in 2021. This is because it may take weeks of laboratory work and research to identify them. However, according to preliminary data up to October, at least 105,000 people are expected to die from overdose in 2021, up from 93,000 in the previous year.

A new study published on Tuesday showed a particularly significant increase in deaths from overdose between the ages of 14 and 18.

According to a paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the number of deaths from overdose in adolescence has been fairly constant for most of the last decade, at around 500 per year. They almost doubled to 954 in 2020, and researchers estimated that last year’s total reached about 1,150.

Joseph Friedman, the lead author of the paper and a researcher at UCLA, called Spike “unprecedented.”

Deaths from overdose of these teens accounted for only about 1% of the total United States. However, despite research suggesting that teenage drug use is declining, adolescents have experienced a greater relative increase than the population as a whole.

Experts attribute this surge to fentanyl, a highly deadly drug that has been cut into heroin for several years. Nowadays, they are also being pushed into counterfeit tablets that resemble prescription drugs that teens sometimes abuse.

National mortality trends affect life expectancy — an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a particular year is expected to live.

With rare exceptions, life expectancy in the United States is steadily increasing year by year. However, CDC’s life expectancy in 2020 is about 77 years, more than a year and a half shorter than 2019.

The CDC has not yet reported the 2021 calculations. However, Goldman and several other researchers make their own estimates presented in papers that have not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals.

These researchers believe that life expectancy in the United States fell by another 5-6 months in 2021 and returned to what it was 20 years ago.

According to Goldman, the loss of life expectancy of more than two years in the last two years is “a huge thing.”

One study looked at mortality data from the United States and 19 other high-income countries. The United States has caused the worst.

“What happened in the United States is more about mutations than the level of resistance to vaccination and the public rejection of practices such as masking and orders to reduce viral infections,” said one of the study’s authors. Dr. Stephen Woolf University of Virginia Commonwealth said in a statement.

Some experts are skeptical that life expectancy will soon recover. They are worried about the long-term complications of COVID-19 that can accelerate the death of people with chronic health problems.

Preliminary (and incomplete) CDC data suggest that there were at least 805,000 American deaths in the first three months of this year. This is well below the same period last year, but higher than the 2020 comparison period.

“In the end, it could be a little higher’new normal’than before,” Anderson said.

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The Associated Press’s Department of Health Sciences is supported by the Science Education Department of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. AP is solely responsible for all content.