5 Worst States for Working-Age Death Increases in July

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Early government mortality numbers show that the number of U.S. deaths has stayed very high this summer, both for members of the general population and for working-age people.

For all U.S. residents, for the period from July 3 through Aug. 27, the number of deaths recorded in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FluView reports was 426,881, according to the report released Friday, which included data sent to the CDC by Sept. 3.

The “all cause” total for the general population was down just 0.8% from the total for the comparable period in 2021, and it was 22% higher than the total for the comparable period in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

For U.S. residents ages 25 through 64, the all-cause death total during that same period was 113,665, according to early, weighted data in the CDC’s Weekly Counts of Deaths by Jurisdiction and Age reports, as of Sept. 8.

For working-age people, the number of deaths was 8.7% lower than the number recorded in the comparable period last year, but still 9.8% higher than in 2019.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic came to public attention in the United States, in early 2020, national mortality changes of more than 1% were unusual.

For a look at the five states with the biggest percentage increases in the working-age death count, see the gallery above.

For data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, see the chart below.

What It Means

Your clients may be tired of thinking about masks and COVID-19, but the increase in the U.S. death rate caused by COVID-19, efforts to fight the pandemic, pandemic-related pressure on the health care system, and other factors may continue to be high enough to throw off life expectancy forecasts for your clients.

They still have to think about building a life expectancy uncertainty factor into life insurance planning, retirement income planning and other mortality-related arrangements.

Data Weaknesses

States are in charge of filing death data, and the completeness and accuracy of the data filed by any given state in a given week may vary widely.

We compensated for data filing lags for the general population by using the CDC FluView report data released in week 35 for 2019, 2021 and 2022.

For the numbers for the working-age population, we compensated by using the CDC’s “weighted data.” The weighted numbers include the CDC’s efforts to adjust for data filing delays.

The States

For July — a month with data that’s starting to firm up — the change in the number of deaths of people ages 25 through 64 between 2019 and this year ranged from a decrease of 28.5%, in Iowa, to an increase of 87.3%.

An 87.3% increase means that the number of total deaths of working-age people in that state in July was almost twice as high as it was in July 2019.

(Image: Adobe Stock)

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