COVID-19 drops to 10th leading cause of death in 2023
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that COVID-19 has become the 10th leading cause of death in the United States in 2023. It remained in fourth place in 2022.
Heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injuries, categories of death that have risen sharply in recent years, mainly due to drug overdoses, remain the top three causes of death. Strokes, which was in fifth place before the pandemic, rose to fourth place.
"In 2020, COVID-19 significantly changed the ranking of leading causes of death. Since then, COVID-19 mortality has declined," researchers from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics said in an article published Thursday in the journal JAMA. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death in the United States, surpassed by heart disease and cancer.
The number of deaths from COVID-19 has since decreased, mainly because many of the surviving population have been vaccinated or have immunity to past infections.
CDC officials previously indicated that the sharp decline in COVID-19 deaths could even put it in the top 10 for suicide deaths last year, but suicides take a long time to report, and it was the 10th leading cause of death before the suicide deaths were announced.
According to CDC provisional statistics, suicide will remain 11th in 2023. The number of suicide deaths reported in 2023 was 49,303, a slight decrease from 2022.
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Data for 2019-2022 are final. Data for 2023 are provisional. |