U.S. COVID Deaths Undercounted: Toll Could Be 1M

Public health experts say the true death toll of the pandemic in the U.S. is upwards of 20% higher than the official tally. That’s based on research showing that deaths attributed to COVID-19 do not account for all of the increased deaths in 2020 and 2021 when compared to prior years.

Photo Insert: John Keeton, Jr, 56yo ER RN, Piedmont Henry Hosp, GA, died of COVID-19 on October 11, 2021.

Researchers call the number of deaths above a typical year “excess deaths,” Derek Kravitz, Dillon Bergin, Betsy Ladyzhets, and Mohar Chatterjee reported for Muckrock.

This means the number of Americans who have died from the virus could be closer to 1 million, not the roughly 793,000 deaths officially recorded as of Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2021. But it’s been hard for researchers to figure out exactly how many COVID-19 deaths are going uncounted and why.

We’ve almost certainly undercounted,” Dr. Bob Anderson, chief of mortality statistics for the CDC, said. “But if we want to really improve the data, we need to know a little more. We need to know where we’re missing cases.”

On Monday, the CDC released new data and a public tool that will bring researchers closer to understanding that. The data could answer questions about what types of non-COVID deaths increased during the pandemic and which COVID-19 deaths have been misclassified as something else, such as death from heart disease, stroke or respiratory illness, said Andrew Stokes, an assistant professor of demography and sociology at Boston University’s Department of Global Health.

Hispanics had the highest increase in death rates from 2019 to 2020 of any single demographic group tracked by the CDC. Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Black Americans weren’t far behind. The death rate for Native Americans and Alaska Natives rose by 37% from 2019 to 2020.

For Black Americans, it rose by 29%. The new CDC data shows the 2021 death rates for those groups are on track to exceed pre-pandemic levels. For Native Americans and Alaska Natives, the death rate so far in 2021 is 11% higher than it was in all of 2019.

The 2021 death rate among Black Americans is on track to remain above 2019. In 2020, the death rate among white Americans was 14% higher than in 2019. For the first 10 months of 2021, it’s 9% lower than 2019, suggesting that deaths for the full year will be close to pre-pandemic levels.

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