NEW YORK (AP) - This is the deadliest year in U.S. history, with deaths expected to top 3 million for the first time - due mainly to the coronavirus pandemic.
Final mortality data for this year will not be available for months. However, preliminary numbers suggest the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019.
U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. However, the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15 percent and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted.
That would mark the largest single-year percentage leap since 1918, when tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a flu pandemic. Deaths rose 46 percent that year, compared with 1917.
COVID-19 has killed more than 318,000 Americans and counting. Before it came along, there was reason to be hopeful about U.S. death trends.
The nation's overall mortality rate fell a bit in 2019, due to reductions in heart disease and cancer deaths. And life expectancy inched up - by several weeks - for the second straight year, according to death certificate data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, life expectancy for 2020 could end up dropping as much as three full years, said Robert Anderson, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC counted 2,854,838 U.S. deaths last year, or nearly 16,000 more than 2018. That's fairly good news: Deaths usually rise by 20,000-50,000 each year, mainly due to the nation's aging, and growing, population.
Indeed, the age-adjusted death rate dropped about 1 percent in 2019, and life expectancy rose by about six weeks to 78.8 years, the CDC reported.
A burst of pneumonia cases early this year may have been COVID-19 deaths that simply weren't recognized as such early in the epidemic. But there also have been an unexpected number of deaths from certain types of heart and circulatory diseases, diabetes and dementia, Anderson said.
Many of those, too, may be related to COVID. The virus could have weakened patients already struggling with those conditions, or it could have diminished the care they were getting, he said.
Early in the epidemic, some were optimistic car crash deaths would drop as people stopped commuting or driving to social events. Data on that is not yet in, but anecdotal reports suggest there was no such decline.
Suicide deaths dropped in 2019 compared with 2018, but early information suggests they have not continued to drop this year, Anderson and others said.
Drug overdose deaths, meanwhile, got much worse.
Before the coronavirus even arrived, the U.S. was in the midst of the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in its history.
Data for all of 2020 is not yet available. But last week, the CDC reported more than 81,000 drug overdose deaths in the 12 months ending in May, making it the highest number ever recorded in a one-year period.