Fall COVID-19 Surge Continues

Early death tracking figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the recent surge in COVID-19 cases is continuing to increase overall U.S. mortality.

COVID-19, pneumonia and influenza caused at least 2,093, or 8.6%, of the 24,056 deaths included in the very earliest, incomplete death count data for the week ending Dec. 16.

COVID-19 alone caused about 3% of the deaths, up from 1% during the week ending July 1, when the disease seemed to be fading away, and up from 2.9% during the week ending Dec. 3.

The earliest reasonably complete death numbers are for the week ending Dec. 2. They show that the United States as a whole reported 51,863 deaths for that. That’s 9.8% lower than the number recorded for the comparable week in 2022 but 8.4% higher than the number recorded for the comparable week in 2019, before COVID-19 came to light.

What it means: Any retirement or estate planning forecasters who built significant mortality improvement into 2023 projections may have to recalibrate.

The context: The total number of U.S. deaths from all causes for the period running from Jan. 1, 2023, through Dec. 2, 2023, was 2.8 million.

That was down 5.9% from the total for the comparable period in 2022 but up 8.3% for the comparable period in 2019.

For the four-week period from Nov. 5 through Dec. 2, the death count has been 9.6% higher than in the comparable period in 2019.