Steven Woolf has been tracking COVID-19's toll on the United States throughout the pandemic. He’s lead author in an assessment released today in the Journal of the American Medical Association that shows the death count from March 2020 through year’s end was 22.9% higher than would be expected in an average year, with Black Americans sustaining the highest excess death rate per capita.
There were 522,368 excess deaths in 2020. Excess deaths are calculated in this assessment based on the average number of fatalities expected when averaging fatalities over the previous five years. It’s generally no more than a 2% fluctuation each year. There were 2.8 million deaths in America last year.
Virginia sustained 67,478 deaths in the past year, with 9,690 considered excess deaths.
Nationally, about 72% of the excess deaths from March 1, 2020, through Jan. 2 of this year are attributable to the novel coronavirus, according to Woolf in a VCU release. The remainder may be due to the virus but weren’t reported as COVID-19 cases on death certificates, or could be from other issues that have been exacerbated by the pandemic, such as drug overdoses, suicide or failure to seek treatment for emergencies such as a heart attack.
Black Americans make up about 12.5% of the U.S. population but accounted for 16.9% of excess deaths, with an excess death rate of 208.4 deaths per 100,000. Among non-Hispanic whites, it was 157 excess deaths per 100,000.
Woolf says that the toll reflects the pandemic and that “conditions other than COVID-19 are also occurring at higher rates in the African American population,” according to the release. He also cautions that we may be lifting COVID-19-related precautions too soon, and that the restrictions may need to continue even as vaccination rates rise, to hold down the rate of excess deaths.