Millennial 2022 U.S. Mortality: Drug Overdoses Still Dominate
As COVID subsides, external causes of death still concern: homicide and motor vehicle accidents still very elevated
Continuing on with my cause-of-death analysis for 2022 by age group. Here are prior posts:
Gen X 2022 U.S. Mortality: Drug ODs Did Us In More Than COVID
Boomer 2022 Mortality: Much Improved, Still Elevated Over 2019
As you can tell from that first headline, I’m part of Gen X (I’m 49 years old). It did get hit more with excess mortality as we’ve got the worst of both worlds: the idiocy of semi-youth with excess drug overdose deaths plus the increasing physical susceptibility to natural causes of death like COVID, heart disease, and more.
So when we get to the young adult groups of age 18-39 years old, the natural causes of death tend to drop off, and the external cause nasties come to the fore: drug overdoses, motor vehicle accident deaths, suicide, and homicide.
It is fairly ugly.
At the younger end, I don’t match up with traditional CDC age categories, because I like keeping official adults and minors separate as groups. I will do an age 1-17 separate. (Infant mortality is extremely complicated, and I stay away from that one for generational round-ups. It has a very different time-line for deaths as well as list of causes.)
Last year’s equivalent post:
The 2021 results saw large increases in mortality, especially in the age 35-39 age group, with large contributions from COVID deaths.
Let’s see how 2022 shook out.
High-level rate results for ages 18-39
As with the other generations, there was a decrease in death rates in 2022. COVID deaths decreased in 2022, but as we shall see, that was not necessarily true of other causes of death.
We can see some of these age groups have had a bad trend pre-pandemic, by the way.
Age 18-24, Deaths by Cause
Longer term trend, 1999 - 2022
From the long-term view, we can see that improvement in the early 2000s came from the drop in motor vehicle accident deaths. The pre-pandemic roller coaster came from multiple bad trends, but I’m not writing about that today.
Age 18-24: Attribution of increase in mortality, 2020-2022
Focusing solely on the pandemic years, we can see that the external causes of death of drug overdoses, homicide, and motor vehicle accident deaths really outweighed everything else for the age 18-24 group.
If you look at the longer-term trend, they had troublesome aspects leading up to the pandemic, too.
Age 25-29, Deaths by Cause
Longer term trend, 1999 - 2022
This one really had a bad long-term trend. As you can see — drug overdoses are the main driver for the bad mortality 1999-2019.
Age 25-29: Attribution of increase in mortality, 2020-2022
While other external causes of death contribute, drug overdoses dominate in all years. COVID was substantial in 2021 but subsided greatly in 2022.
Age 30-34, Deaths by Cause
Longer term trend, 1999 - 2022
Not much different from age 25-29, but we have to be methodical.
Age 30-34: Attribution of increase in mortality, 2020-2022
If I want to say something different here from the age 25-29 group, I will say the drug OD death rate is a little less in 2022 compared to 2021. Not much, but at least it is going in the right direction.
Age 35-39, Deaths by Cause
Longer term trend, 1999 - 2022
Again, the trend has been bad since 2010 or so.
Age 35-39: Attribution of increase in mortality, 2020-2022
Drug overdoses really dominate. The decrease in 2022 may be ephemeral, really.
Summary tables of contribution to excess mortality, ages 18-39
So let us look at the attribution tables, and here we can see the major causes that actually decreased during the pandemic.
2020
Remember that each row of attribution adds up to 100% of the contribution, so it does not indicate the percentage increase for that particular cause. But it does give an indication.
In 2020, you can see that drug overdoses were the top contributor - but there were hefty contributions from COVID and homicide, depending on the age range.
2021
COVID was a more substantial contributor in 2021 for these age groups, but you can see drug overdoses were still at least a third of the contribution. The increase in death rates compared to 2019 were very high for all groups.
2022
As we see COVID subside, drug overdoses come to the fore, approaching almost half of the cause of mortality increases.
This is horrible. Especially when we see the total increase over 2019 is still very high — 30% is huge! I would love to see the drug OD trend reverse, but we’ve yet to see that.
