Daily deaths in U․S․ now 10% higher than in previous years

PanARMENIAN.Net - The number of people dying each day in the United States since early April has been consistently more than 10% higher than in previous years, according to a new report from the Health Care Cost Institute in Washington, CNN reports.

The institute connects this rise in daily deaths to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Health Care Cost Institute, an independent nonprofit research organization, based its report on data from obituaries for all deaths due to any cause, not just Covid-19.

To better understand the number of daily deaths happening in the United States during the pandemic, researchers at the institute compared the daily count of deaths for each day this year with the average number of deaths on each day for the years 2014 through 2019. Those estimates for daily deaths are reported at the national and state level, and for New York City.

New York City, widely held as the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, experienced more than double the typical daily deaths every day since the end of March, the Health Care Cost Institute noted on its website.

"By mid-April, we begin to observe a decline in daily deaths in some areas such as New York and New Jersey; daily deaths continued to rise in other states such as Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland," the Health Care Cost Institute said. "We will continue to monitor these trends and many others as the data is updated each week."

The institute's new data, updated weekly, aggregates information on daily deaths in the United States using obituaries from online newspapers, funeral homes, online memorials, direct submissions and other sources through a health data system called Datavant.

US health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tend to rely on death certificate data to track daily deaths.