New Jobs
Nurse Innovators Take the Spotlight at ViVE 2025 Holland startup raises $27M to expand gig-based medical coding platform Omnicare Pharmacy to Pay $124M Settlement for Illegal Kickbacks to Nursing Homes State scholarship aims to address behavioral health worker shortage - YouTube Omnicare Pharmacy to Pay $124M Settlement for Illegal Kickbacks to Nursing Homes Night Nurse Arrested For Not Feeding Child, Faces Felony Neglect Charges - Nurse.org Wallace-Dothan hosts simulation for area nursing and medical students - MSN Baystate Health eliminates nearly 100 corporate positions | HealthLeaders Media This Week's Health IT Jobs – February 5, 2025 | Healthcare IT Today Fake Nurse Sentenced for Medicaid Fraud, Gets 5 Years Probation - Nurse.org (Dual post linked with Job ID 54730 Medical Coding Specialist) - HigherEdJobs The new-collar revolution - The New Indian Express PMBAUSA LLC Grants $2M Worth of Medical Coding Credentials as Part of Certification ... JCC partners with CareerStep for online healthcare job training | News | bradfordera.com ScribeEMR to Highlight AI Scribing and Virtual Coding Advances at the National Association ..... CAPS launches new program for lab techs - The Source - WashU American Nurses Association Announces Code of Ethics for Nurses Revision 2025 Intermediate Full Stack C# Developer - South Africa - Centurion - Bizcommunity This Week's Health IT Jobs – January 29, 2025 | Healthcare IT Today Peirce College to Work with Chester County Economic Development Council on Good Jobs ... - MS... Opening Up About My Mental Health, How a Wellness Retreat Helped Me Overcome Past Trauma Per Diem Nurse Staffing Market to Skyrocket—$16.4 Billion by 2033 - Nurse.org Medical Coding Market Size to Surpass USD 89.49 Billion by 2033 | Straits Research Peirce College to Work with Chester County Economic Development Council on Good Jobs ... AI job market booms with 42% growth over two years; overall hiring up by 31% (YoY) in Decembe... Nurse Practitioner Billed Insurance $62M In Fake B-12 Shots Scheme, Gets 5 Years Prison High-Paying Jobs That Don't Require College Salary Story: I Never Thought I Would Make Six Figures — Here's How I Got There - MSN Unifying Innovation and Patient-Centricity: Clinion Leads the AI Revolution at ISCR 2025 Offered $45 and Hour With a Master's Degree - Nurse Educator Pay Is a Healthcare Crisis VA Hospital Overhauls Security After Nurse Attack U.S. News and World Report Best Jobs - MedCentral Top 10 Highest-Paying Remote Jobs in 2025 - Education Times Zuckerberg Announces Plans to Automate Facebook Coding Jobs With AI - MSN Incentives aim to lure RNs to nursing home jobs | HealthLeaders Media Top Master's in Health Informatics Programs | 2025 - Nurse.org Get paid +$150,000 in 2025: 5 remote jobs to travel the world - ECOticias.com Nearly One-third of Nursing Assistants Are Immigrants In MN - Here's Why - Nurse.org Solutions3X Opens Medical Coding Center in Hyderabad - Business News This Week Hyderabad: Skill University announces 3 new courses YIS University rolls out 3 job-oriented courses - The Hans India Solutions3X opens medical coding training centre in Ameerpet, second unit in city Ambulance Billing Technician | Jobs | uniondemocrat.com Meet the Monster Truck-Driving ER Nurse! Medical Record Technician (Coder) Job in Naytahwaush, Minnesota - LemonWire 24 Useless College Degrees Facing Dead-End Jobs and Loads of Debt - MSN 24 Useless College Degrees Facing Dead-End Jobs and Loads of Debt - MSN Artificial Intelligence and Its Impact on the Job Market - Techshali MPESB Group 4 Salary 2025: Post-wise Job Profile, Pay Scale, Benefits & Yearly Package Top 5 Work-From-Home Nurse Practitioner Jobs for 2025

Medical Coding Jobs

Find your dream Job in Medical Coding

Medical Coding Jobs
News

One Year In: How Covid’s Toll Compares With Other Causes of Death

Now that the coronavirus has been in the United States for roughly a year, new numbers are revealing the scale of covid-19’s impact on American health: Covid has become the country’s third-leading cause of death, and could be on its way to outpacing cancer.

This story also ran on PolitiFact. It can be republished for free.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 528,603 Americans had died of the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University data. And a closely watched model from researchers at the University of Washington projects that this number will rise past 575,000 by June 1.

“The toll of death is simply staggering — worse than I would have predicted,” said Arthur Caplan, founding head of the division of medical ethics at the New York University School of Medicine. “Covid has been nothing short of the worst failure of public policy in modern memory.”

With a year’s worth of data, it’s possible to look more precisely at how the coronavirus compares with the more routine causes of death in the U.S.

The chart below compares the coronavirus death figure (in red) over the past year or so, with the 10 leading causes of death in 2019, the last year for which full data is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The takeaway is that the coronavirus killed more Americans in the past year than any cause of death in 2019, other than heart disease and cancer. And if the University of Washington model proves accurate, then by June, the 15-month toll from the coronavirus will be close to matching the annual number of deaths from cancer.

All other causes of death pale in comparison to the coronavirus death toll. So far, the coronavirus has killed roughly three times as many people as accidents, lung ailments, stroke or Alzheimer’s disease did in 2019. And the coronavirus has outpaced the number of deaths from diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia and suicide by even larger multiples.

Caution is warranted when comparing these causes of death. Most of the 10 leading causes of death are not primarily driven by infections, whereas the coronavirus is. So it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which any of the other causes could spike the way coronavirus did.

Another way to look at the toll of the coronavirus pandemic is by considering “excess deaths,” a statistic tracked by the CDC. This data takes the number of actual deaths in a given period and subtracts the average number of deaths from all causes during the comparable period in recent years. 

The CDC data shows how excess deaths have risen with spikes in covid infections. In some weeks over the past year, there were as many as 22,000 excess deaths. 

The weekly excess deaths add up to 559,887 additional deaths since the pandemic began. 

That’s a bit higher than the 502,005 coronavirus deaths officially recorded. However, the additional 58,000 deaths could reflect a combination of coronavirus deaths that didn’t get recorded as such; deaths caused by people unwilling or unable to go to the hospital for other serious illnesses during the pandemic; or from overdoses or suicides stemming from increased social isolation during the pandemic. (Because of reporting lags, the death certificates used to determine excess deaths tend to understate recent weeks’ totals and are expected to increase in future weeks as more data rolls in.)

“There is nothing like these abstract statistics to illustrate the ‘psychic numbing’ we experience when dealing with large-scale loss of life,” said David Ropeik, author of the book “How Risky Is it, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.” 

“It’s unlikely that, as stark as these figures are, that they will evoke nearly as much emotion as the personal story of any one of these victims,” Ropeik said. “A risk depicted as a face, or a name — that is, ‘personified’ — is one we can imagine happening to ourselves. Statistics are inhuman and far less moving.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Syndicated from https://khn.org/news/article/pandemic-first-year-how-covid-toll-compares-with-other-causes-of-death/