Even though the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cannot start ranking leading causes of deaths until the end of the year in order to get a full year's worth of data, statisticians at the agency told CNN in an email on Thursday that they expect Covid-19 will end up among the Top 10 leading causes of death in the nation.
"We know that based on the # of COVID-19 deaths so far in 2020, it will end up as a Top 10 leading cause of death but won’t know exactly how high it will rank until next year," CDC mortality statisticians said in the email. "Heart Disease and Cancer, the two leading causes of death in the U.S., account for more than half of all deaths in the U.S. each year and that isn’t expected to change."
Final data are based on death certificates for the calendar year.
In 2018, the latest year for which final data is available, the top 10 leading causes of death among all ages in the United States were:
- Heart disease (655,381)
- Cancer (599,274)
- Unintentional injury (167,127)
- Chronic lower respiratory disease (159,486)
- Stroke (147,810)
- Alzheimer's disease (122,019)
- Diabetes (84,946)
- Flu and pneumonia (59,120)
- Nephritis (51,386)
- Suicide (48,344)
As of 5 p.m. ET, nearly 144,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the United States so far this year.