Silent Generation 2022 Mortality: Is it getting any better?
Ambiguity reigns -- and it's not necessarily from COVID
Now that the CDC WONDER database is updating weekly (for now), the data seem complete enough to do some cause-of-death analysis for 2022, though it’s not officially finalized.
As I did last year, let’s take it by “generations”, but this time, I’m going to take it by the oldest groups first and then progress toward the youngest.
It is not clear if mortality really improved much in 2022 for the oldest Americans compared to 2021.
Last year, I thought mortality had gotten better for the oldest group in 2021 compared to 2020, but that may have been misleading due to population estimates at the time. My current death rate estimates may have the same shortcomings.
I am not going to try to “fix” the denominator (population estimate), but I bet the numerator (death count) is very accurate (if not precise).
Age 80 - 84 Deaths by Cause
Long-Term Trend 1999-2022
This graph is just to show you a general shape of causes of death, and how they stack up.
But I do know you cannot tell very well which causes increased or decreased, especially during the pandemic. It is clear COVID popped up, and did decrease in 2022.
So let’s look.
Age 80-84: Attribution of increase in mortality, 2020-2022
This is really just a first look for me (okay, it’s not, but please roll with it.)
You can see that COVID really shrank as a cause of death in 2022 for age 80-84, so let us pause to celebrate.
Enough celebration. Let us move on.
Because you should notice that the overall mortality level in 2022 is about the same level as 2020, it just happens to be a mix of other causes of death.
Causes of death that pop out to me in 2022 are:
Heart disease
Cancer
Stroke
“Other causes”
Heart disease and cancer are the top two causes of death, so that is not necessarily surprising, but they’re getting worse, and at least in the case of cancer, that had been improving pre-pandemic. Now it’s not.
Let’s put a button on stroke for a moment.
As for that “other causes” bucket… what’s in there? I’ll have to dig.
Age 85+ Deaths by Cause
No, this is not just the same graph as I posted above. First, check out the vertical scale.
Yeah — that 16,000 out of 100,000 as the max means a 16% chance of death in one year. That’s pretty high. Mortality rates climb very rapidly in old age.
Also, note how much “real estate” the heart disease cause takes up here. It’s huge.
I’m sure you appreciate the visual.
But let us see how the components of change break out.
Age 85+: Attribution of increase in mortality, 2020-2022
Yes, COVID was a huge component that then shrank in 2022. Just as with ages 80-84.
I will quantify this shortly below.
But while COVID mortality may be decreasing, take a look at other causes of death, especially as we see them trend 2020-2022:
Heart disease
Stroke
Cancer
“Other causes”
And yes, the “other causes” is just because I haven’t dug further into what may be going on in there.
But even before that, I should see if there are aspects of heart disease deaths (ischemic? congestive heart failure?) that need to be looked at.
These are all being compared against 2019, and as I have looked at earlier with respect to heart disease, there were bad trends with mortality for this cause pre-pandemic.
Summary tables of contribution to excess mortality, age 80+
I did tables for these in last year’s post, and the 2020 results aren’t any different as I was using finalized statistics that haven’t changed.
But I will give you both the 2020 and 2021 tables so you can see what those look like before I discuss the 2022 results:
2020
2021
2022
Let’s talk.
The mortality in 2022 is not any better for the oldest Americans than it was in 2020 or 2021.
But the mix of which causes of death contributed to that increase in mortality compared to 2019 was very different in 2022 compared to the key pandemic years.
What is going on there?
Looking at these causes, I see that I didn’t put in flu/pneumonia, and that’s partly because those weren’t on the radar for 2020-2021. So perhaps I need to throw those back in for these age groups. I pick specific causes of death depending on the age groups I’m looking at.
But I am really concerned about the increasing rates of heart disease in particular, because that’s already a huge cause of death — I will need to look at that one more in specific.
I will be looking at Boomers next, then Gen X, Millennials, etc.
