Lauren Pineda
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just released information showing how many people who died from COVID-19 had several underlying medical conditions that contributed to their death. According to the CDC report, “Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.”
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The following COVID-19 deaths are the top underlying medical conditions that were linked with the coronavirus deaths:
- Influenza and pneumonia
- Respiratory failure
- Hypertensive disease
- Diabetes
- Vascular and unspecified dementia
- Cardiac Arrest
- Heart failure or Heart disease
- Renal failure
- Intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning and other adverse events
- Other medical conditions
The following CDC chart shows a breakdown of the deaths by age that were affected by COVID-19.
According to the CDC in the United States, there have been 9,683 deaths with only having COVID-19 listed on their death certificate. Their data uses provisional death counts to “deliver the most complete and accurate picture of lives lost to COVID-19.” These are based on death certificates which are the most reliable source of data and contain information that is not available anywhere else, including race and ethnicity, comorbid conditions, and place of death.
Provisional of death counts may not match other sources, such as numbers or media reports from County Health Departments, death certificates taking time to be completed, status report different rates, it takes extra time to code coronavirus deaths, and other reporting systems use different methods are definitions for counting the deaths. The CDC report also stated provisional counts are not final and are subject to change, the counts from weeks before are continually revised as more records are received and processed, and death count should not be compared across the United States.
