U.S. Death Rate From All Causes (Including COVID-19) Hit All-Time Lows End of March

Here’s a shocker: The U.S. crude death rate (mortality from all causes) is the lowest it’s been since the CDC has been tracking deaths attributed to the flu, pneumonia and all causes on this website.

You can download the data as verify for yourself: Just go to this CDC website and click the green ‘downloads’ button. They have data for total U.S. deaths up until week 13 (week ending Mar. 29, 2020). Week 13 is 93% complete. Week 12 is 100% complete.

At the very least, this data shows we need to analyze COVID-19 deaths in the context of the broader U.S. mortality rate from all causes. It appears normal deaths are being attributed to COVID-19 if the patient is COVID-19+, even if another underlying chronic cause is responsible.

Awaiting April Data

Strange: The CDC stopped reporting weekly mortality. Usually, the data on the website is updated on Mondays. However, this past Monday, there was no update. So we do not know how crude mortality has changed since March 29th.

The week ending March 29th, the U.S. averaged 311 COVID-19 deaths per day. April 13th (yesterday) recorded 1,535 deaths.

The Number of Weekly US Deaths (All Causes) Since 2013:
If you are having trouble viewing the graph below on mobile, view the standalone graph.

Weekly US Death Rate (All Causes) Since 2103
We used the CDC weekly death data to calculate the death rate (weekly deaths per 100,000 people using the population of the U.S. for the year in question). Since the population has grown, the weekly death rate has hit all-time lows end of March. If you are having trouble viewing the graph below on mobile, view the standalone graph.

We will update as the CDC updates. But it appears they stopped updating weekly mortality for all causes (they have historically updated weekly data on Mondays, but did not update yesterday).