Authored by Patrick Heuveline via TheConversation.com,
The big idea
People in the U.S. are dying at higher rates than in other similar high-income countries, and that difference is only growing. That’s the key finding of a new study that I published in the journal PLOS One.
In 2021, more than 892,000 of the 3,456,000 deaths the U.S. experienced, or about 1 in 4, were “excess deaths.” In 2019, that number was 483,000 deaths, or nearly 1 in 6. That represents an 84.9% increase in excess deaths in the U.S. between 2019 and 2021.
Excess deaths refer to the actual number of deaths that occur in a given year compared with expected deaths over that same time period based on prior years or, as in this study, in other countries.
