12 Worst States for Deaths in Q1

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Death may have eased up on the United States since the peak COVID-19 pandemic weeks of 2021 and 2022, but it’s still hard at work.

The very earliest U.S. death figures for the first quarter show that the country recorded at least 729,112 deaths during the first 12 weeks of the year, according to unadjusted death counts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That was 8.1% below the total for the first quarter of 2022, but it was still 15% higher than the average, as of early April, for the first quarters of 2017, 2018 and 2019 — after the CDC switched to its current system of tracking death totals but before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the 12 states where deaths are up most over the 2017-2019 average, check out the gallery. For a table with data from all 50 states, keep scrolling.

What It Means

The total number of excess deaths is still large enough for any financial professionals who want to help clients use accurate life expectancy figures in life insurance planning, retirement planning and other planning efforts.

The Data

The national death figures come from the raw, unadjusted death data that the CDC uses to decide whether the country is suffering from a flu or flu-like pandemic. The indicator threshold continues to be above the epidemic threshold, as it has been since March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic came to light in the United States.

The state figures come from another source: the predicted mortality data included in another CDC weekly mortality publication.

The state-level death figures are lower and appear to be less complete, even after adjustment, than the figures in the CDC’s flu reports. At the state level, the change in the number of first-quarter deaths over the 2017-2019 baseline ranged from a decrease of 10.6% to an increase of  27.8%, with the median being an increase of 8.6%.

When broken down by age group, the gap between the first-quarter death count for the United States as a whole and the 2017-2019 baseline ranged from a decrease of 2.6%, for people ages 45 through 64, to an increase of 18%, for people ages 25 through 44.

The national mortality data stream and the state mortality data stream show total deaths from all causes. The increase over 2017-2019 could reflect factors such as opioid abuse and the aging of the U.S. population as well as COVID-19, long COVID, the medical, economic and psychological effects of efforts to prevent and fight COVID-19, outbreaks of other illnesses and ups and downs in other health issues, such as diabetes and flu.

The numbers may also reflect ups and downs in state public health teams’ data reporting capacity. Before the COVID-19 pandemic along, public health agencies tended to put less emphasis on rapid mortality data distribution.

(Photo: Elise Amendola/AP)

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