The coronavirus pandemic will make 2020 the deadliest year in US history.
While final data will not be available for months, preliminary figures suggest that the US has seen more than 3.2 million deaths this year, which is at least 400,000 more than in 2019 – a figure that could it continues to grow, according to the Associated Press.
It marks a 15% jump, the largest one-year percentage jump since 1918, when tens of thousands of American soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands died of the Spanish flu.
As of Wednesday morning, COVID-19 had taken 322,849 lives in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University, with the country still recording record increases.
He was sometimes the number one killer before heart disease and cancer – and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) believes he could be responsible for far more than has been counted so far.
An explosion of cases of pneumonia earlier this year could have been deaths caused by COVID-19, which simply were not recognized as such at the beginning of the epidemic, according to Robert Anderson, the CDC official who has death statistics abroad.
An unexpected number of deaths from certain types of heart and circulatory disease, diabetes and dementia can also be linked to the pandemic, attributed to patients already weakened by these conditions and the diminished care they received due to blockages.
Suicide deaths fell in 2019 compared to 2018, but Anderson said the encouraging trend does not appear to have continued this year, an increase attributed to certain blockage loneliness and exacerbation of existing mental health conditions.
Meanwhile, deaths from drug overdose appear to have risen, with the 81,000 recorded in the 12 months ending May being the highest number ever recorded in a year.
Experts blame the disruption of the pandemic on in-person treatment and recovery services, as well as people who abuse drugs while they are alone at home, without anyone being able to ask for help.
But perhaps the biggest factor is that COVID-19 has caused supply problems for dealers, causing them to mix more and more cheap and deadly fentanyl into heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, experts said.
“I do not suspect that there are a lot of new people who suddenly started using drugs because of COVID. In any case, I think the supply of people who already use drugs is more contaminated, “said Shannon Monnat, a researcher at Syracuse University who studies overdose trends.
With Post threads