Heart Disease Overall Leading Cause of Death
The Claim
COVID-19 is the leading cause of death in the U.S.
News posted on
Emerging story
Throughout the last twelve months, many on social media reported that COVID-19 was the number one killer (the leading cause of death in the U.S.).
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar learned that from January 2020 to December 2020, approximately 375,000 U.S. deaths were attributed to COVID-19 according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), COVID-19 was the third, not first leading cause of death in 2020, behind heart disease and cancer.
The numbers for 2020 show that the overall U.S. mortality rate increased for the first time since 2017, by nearly 16 percent, to 3,358,814 deaths. The jump was partially driven by COVID-19, which accounted for an increase of 11.3 percent but heart disease also increased by almost 5 percent, the largest increase in heart disease deaths since 2012 according to JAMA. Increases in deaths also occurred for unintentional injury (11 percent), Alzheimer disease (10 percent), and diabetes (15 percent).
The CDC reports that one person dies every 36 seconds in the U.S. from heart disease. That’s one out of every four deaths. According to US News, unhealthy eating habits, increased consumption of alcohol, lack of physical activity, and the mental stress can all can adversely impact a person's risk for heart disease.
However, at the peak of the pandemic in the U.S., approximately 6,000 people died per day from COVID-19, while under 2,500 deaths per day are caused by heart disease. This means that the viral claim about COVID-19 being the leading cause of death is not incorrect; it just applies to a very specific period of time. As such, we rate this claim as selective.
