We now have U.S. fatality data for 2022, which should be mostly complete. Fatalities for the year still ran well above pre-pandemic levels but were down from 2020 and 2021.
Prior to the pandemic, there were about 2.8 million fatalities each year in the United States. For many years, fatalities have grown consistently at a little over 1 percent each year. There were slight variations, mostly based on the severity of flu seasons.
But in 2020, fatalities jumped by slightly over 19 percent to just under 3.4 million and then another 2.4 percent in 2021, taking total fatalities to nearly 3.5 million. In 2021 and 2022, there were about 1.1 million more fatalities above the number we would have had if fatalities had continued to increase at the pre-pandemic rate….