A HHS study finds ‘long Covid’ was not a major contributor to Covid deaths, amounting to less than 1 percent in most periods.
Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services released the results of a study attempting to assess if “long Covid” was a major factor in the nation’s Covid deaths. According to the official statistics, the U.S. Covid-19 death rate is down significantly from the peaks of earlier waves, but the U.S. is still averaging 200 to 300 Covid deaths a day, with more than 1 million deaths attributed to the virus.
The HHS study found “long Covid” was not a major contributor to Covid deaths, amounting to less than 1 percent in most periods. From January 1, 2020, to June 30, 2022, about 3,544 Covid-19 death certificates, just 0.3 percent, had literal text indicating long Covid as an underlying or contributing cause of death.
The analysis identified 3,544 deaths mentioning long COVID key terms and coded to U07.1, the ICD–10 code for COVID-19, among deaths occurring in the United States from January 1, 2020, through June 30, 2022. The percentage of COVID-19 deaths with long COVID peaked in June 2021 (1.2 percent) and in April 2022 (3.8 percent). The age-adjusted death rate for long COVID was 6.3 per 1 million population for the 12-month period ending in June 2022. The long COVID death rate from July 1, 2021, through June 30, 2022, was highest among adults aged 85 and over, non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native people, and males. Non-Hispanic Asian people had the lowest death rate.
It should not surprise us that long Covid, like Covid in general, is most likely to be deadly among those age 85 and older, because lots of things are more likely to be life-threatening to someone 85 and older. At that age, the human immune system just isn’t as effective at fighting off pathogens as a younger person’s immune system is.
Perhaps one of the most useful conclusions of this study is some clarity sorting out the “died of Covid” or “died with Covid” arguments. (For example, George Floyd had Covid-19 at the time of his death after being restrained by Minneapolis police, but the virus wasn’t what ended his life.) The study found that “COVID-19 was the underlying cause for 88.2 percent of COVID-19–associated deaths in the study period, and a contributing cause of death for the remaining 11.8 percent of such deaths. NVSS data in this report include all deaths occurring in the 50 states, District of Columbia, and New York City, which includes residents of foreign countries and U.S. territories.”
In other words, based on the available records, when we’re talking about Covid deaths, in nine out of ten cases we’re talking about a person dying from Covid, not merely with Covid.
The overall U.S. death rate for all causes is slightly lower at the beginning of 2022 than it was in 2021, but the U.S. death rate increased 19 percent from 2019 to 2020, and remained elevated in 2021.
Many voices on social media choose to believe and contend that the continuing high death rate among Americans of all ages reveals that the Covid-19 vaccines are deadly and are killing off lots of people.
There is little reliable evidence to verify that claim. But the unfortunate fact is that the pandemic, and the almost universal disruption of the normal patterns and behaviors of life, inflicted considerable short-term and long-term harm on Americans, increasing the nation’s death rate.
Some of those increased deaths among all Americans are attributable to Covid-19. But some reflect people who didn’t go to the doctor in 2020, leaving ailments undiagnosed and untreated. Some reflect people who couldn’t get normal treatments because hospitals canceled “nonessential” visits, and patients and providers were slow to make up for lost time.
Addiction rates increased during the pandemic, and drug overdoses soared, with U.S. overdose deaths topping 100,000 during the twelve-month period ending in April 2021. Those struggling with addiction felt the same fear, isolation, loneliness, anxiety, and stress as everyone else – and turned to their vices to ease the pain, an NYU study found:
Not unlike the general population, people who use drugs reported worsened economic conditions—in a region already afflicted by widespread poverty—and mental health during the pandemic. Only 38 percent of participants felt confident that they could maintain a stable income during the pandemic, thanks to layoffs, disruptions to their work in service industries, and fewer available jobs. Moreover, participants reported that the pandemic exacerbated housing and food insecurity.
A significant proportion of participants reported that their mental well-being had suffered: three-quarters of the survey respondents felt more anxious or on edge during the pandemic, more than half felt more depressed, and nearly half felt lonelier. Anxiety and depression are associated with increased substance use, which in turn can increase the risk for overdose.
As a University of North Carolina study noted at the beginning of the year, “in the past year and a half, we have seen increases in deaths due to chronic, manageable diseases like diabetes because of the strain the pandemic has placed on our health care system. We have also seen increases in suicide, homicide and drug overdose deaths, many of which may be related to secondary effects of the pandemic like social isolation, loss of wages and housing insecurity.”
Depression, self-harm, and suicide rates rose dramatically among America’s adolescents; Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy warned late last year, “in early 2021, emergency department visits in the United States for suspected suicide attempts were 51 percent higher for adolescent girls and 4 percent higher for adolescent boys compared to the same time period in early 2019.” The number of children arriving at hospitals for treatment of gun injuries increased 50 percent during the pandemic.
President Biden was right when he said “the pandemic is over,” in the sense that Covid-19 is now mostly a nuisance, an unpleasant cold that lingers. (This Saturday Night Live sketch, depicting a Covid infection as a welcome stay-at-home vacation from work and stress, would have been unthinkable until the Omicron wave was in the rear-view mirror.) But the consequences of the pandemic are still very much in our lives as 2022 comes to a close and 2023 begins.