Over 2 Million Americans Went 'Missing' During 2020 And 2021
A new analysis now estimates that in 2020 and 2021, more than two million Americans went 'missing' from the population.
These are the people who would still be alive if the US had the same death rate as other high-income nations.
To be clear, not all of these 'excess' deaths are due to COVID-19, but a significant portion are tied to the timing of the global pandemic.
"Imagine the lives saved, the grief and trauma averted, if the US simply performed at the average of our peers," says lead author and epidemiologist Jacob Bor from Boston University.
The analysis is a broad, sweeping take on a big and complicated issue, but it supports previous studies that have also found Americans suffer poor survival outcomes compared to residents in other wealthy nations.
The new study compares more than 107 million deaths of any cause in the US between 1980 and 2023 to death rates in 21 other wealthy nations. The selected countries each had a 2021 GDP exceeding US $24,000 per capita, and had data available in the Human Mortality Database spanning the study period.
Over those 43 years, the US experienced 14.7 million excess deaths relative to its peers, with a significant uptick starting in 2020.
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic began, however, data suggest health outcomes in the US were gradually slipping compared to the rest of the world.
The spread of a novel coronavirus in 2020 only widened that gap.
Bor and colleagues calculated that in 2019, there was a total of 631,247 missing Americans. In 2020 and 2021, that number shot up to over a million per year.
By 2022, excess deaths had slipped back to 820,396, before dropping further to 705,331 in 2023. But that is still significantly higher than in 2019.
If the US experienced the same expected death rates as other nations, the authors of the study think nearly a quarter of all deaths could have been avoided in 2023, many among younger people.
"One out of every two US deaths under 65 years is likely avoidable," says Bor.
"Our failure to address this is a national scandal."
These excess deaths are not simply due to the consequences of the coronavirus, although the pandemic certainly exacerbated the issue.
Sociologist Elizabeth Wrigley-Field from the University of Minnesota says that the increase in deaths from 2019 to 2023 is also "driven by long-running crises in drug overdose, gun violence, car collisions, and preventable cardiometabolic deaths."
In a previous study from 2023, researchers used global data to show that the US experiences excess mortality in every single age group compared to its wealthy peers.
If the US could achieve the lower mortality rates of Japan, for example, the 2023 study suggested more than 880,000 deaths could be prevented. That's comparable to eliminating all deaths from heart disease, diabetes, and unintentional injuries.
"Other countries show that investing in universal healthcare, strong safety nets, and evidence-based public health policies leads to longer, healthier lives," says senior author Andrew Stokes, demographer and sociologist at Boston University.
"These deaths reflect not individual choices, but policy neglect and deep-rooted social and health system failures. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed structural weaknesses – including gaps in healthcare access and social supports – that have continued to fuel premature deaths even after the acute phase of the pandemic ended."
The research letter was published in JAMA Health Forum.
Blood-Brain Barrier 'Guardian' Shows Promise Against Alzheimer's
Anti-Aging Cocktail Extends Mouse Lifespan by About 30 Percent
Sudden Death Among Professional Bodybuilders Raises Health Concerns
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
27 minutes ago
- New York Post
I went blind after doing cartwheels — here's what I learned after losing my vision
A woman who lost her ability to see after a joyful romp on the beach is opening up about the frightening ordeal. Deborah Cobb was 19 years old when she broke out in a series of cartwheels — only to come up without her vision. Now 42, Cobb has said that she has the ocular health of an 80-year-old and anticipates she will soon return to blindness due to early-onset macular degeneration. Advertisement 4 Seemingly harmless horseplay caused temporary blindness and chronic illness for one 19-year-old woman. Mikhail Ulyannikov – In a new interview with Newsweek, Cobb said she was with her friends when she decided to challenge herself to do as many cartwheels in a row as she could 'just for fun.' 'I started doing them and got to 13 and fell over super dizzy. My eyes were kind of spinning, so it took a moment to realize that my eyes weren't focusing,' she recalled. Advertisement 'Looking at her face, it was a giant orange blur,' Cobb continued, referring to a friend who witnessed the shocking moments. 'My eyes wouldn't fully focus. There was no pain, and my peripheral vision was fine, but everything I looked directly at was blocked by an orange blur.' Cobb's harrowing story went viral in a recent post on Instagram, where she detailed the mysterious medical phenomenon that doctors first thought was a sign of leukemia and even AIDS. 'I had neither. Just weak blood vessels in my eyes that is apparently a genetic trait as I later learned,' she wrote of her condition, called macular degeneration. 4 Deborah Cobb, now 42, shared details of her macular degeneration diagnosis on Instagram. deborahcobb_ihp/Instagram Advertisement Cobb explained in the viral video post that her gymnastic stunts had caused internal hemorrhages in a part of her eye called the macula, an area at the center of the retina that is responsible for sharp, focused vision. Macular degeneration is the leading cause of vision loss, affecting more than 200,000 Americans every year, usually brought on by old age and other factors, including genetics and cardiovascular disease. The condition causes blurred and distorted vision, dark spots changes in color perception. She was deemed 'legally blind' for three months after the initial incident, and did not regain full vision for another three months thereafter. 4 Macular degeneration, usually only seen in the elderly, affects the eye's ability to bring sight into sharp focus. mihai – Advertisement Cobb's life came to a halt during that time. As a result of the injury, she was forced to quit massage school. She couldn't drive, watch TV or even look at herself in the mirror. Though she was eventually able to return to school and later earned her license in massage therapy, she still lives in fear of losing her vision again. 'I can't do anything upside down or anything that causes too much blood to rush to my head. It happened once from doing push-ups, so I have to limit myself physically,' Cobb wrote. 4 Due to her eye condition, Cobb can no longer engage in physically exhaustive activities without risk of losing her vision again. deborahcobb_ihp/Instagram The experience inspired Cobb to dedicate her career to integrative medicine, and she now works with clients who suffer from anxiety and nervous system dysregulation. Cobb has also said that losing her vision gave her a positive new outlook on life, saying she's so thankful for the lessons in empathy and 'to not take the simple things for granted.' 'I could live in fear because of it, or I could be filled with gratitude because of it,' Cobb concluded in the thoughtful post. 'I choose gratitude, because who wants to live in fear?!'
Boston Globe
27 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Trump's tariffs are making money. That may make them hard to quit.
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'The good news is that Tariffs are bringing Billions of Dollars into the USA!' Trump said on social media shortly after a weak jobs report showed signs of strain in the labor market. Advertisement Over time, analysts expect that the tariffs, if left in place, could be worth more than $2 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade. Economists overwhelmingly hope that doesn't happen and the United States abandons the new trade barriers. But some acknowledge that such a substantial stream of revenue could end up being hard to quit. Advertisement 'I think this is addictive,' said Joao Gomes, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. 'I think a source of revenue is very hard to turn away from when the debt and deficit are what they are.' The Port of Baltimore on June 30, 2025. ALYSSA SCHUKAR/NYT Trump has long fantasized about replacing taxes on income with tariffs. He often refers fondly to American fiscal policy in the late 19th century, when there was no income tax and the government relied on tariffs, citing that as a model for the future. And while income and payroll taxes remain by far the most important sources of government revenue, the combination of Trump's tariffs and the latest Republican tax cut does, on the margin, move the United States away from taxing earnings and toward taxing goods. Such a shift is expected to be regressive, meaning that rich Americans will fare better than poorer Americans under the change. That's because cutting taxes on income does, in general, provide the biggest benefit to richer Americans who earn the most income. The recent Republican cut to income taxes and the social safety net is perhaps the most regressive piece of major legislation in decades. Placing new taxes on imported products, however, is expected to raise the cost of everyday goods. Lower-income Americans spend more of their earnings on those more expensive goods, meaning the tariffs amount to a larger tax increase for them compared with richer Americans. Tariffs have begun to bleed into consumer prices, with many companies saying they will have to start raising prices as a result of added costs. And analysts expect the tariffs to weigh on the performance of the economy overall, which in turn could reduce the amount of traditional income tax revenue the government collects every year. Advertisement 'Is there a better way to raise that amount of revenue? The economic answer is: Yes, there is a better way, there are more efficient ways,' said Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab and a former Biden administration official. 'But it's really a political question.' Workers welded steel components together at a Thomas Built Buses plant in High Point, N.C., on July 21, 2025. TRAVIS DOVE/NYT Tedeschi said that future leaders in Washington, whether Republican or Democrat, may be hesitant to roll back the tariffs if that would mean a further addition to the federal debt load, which is already raising alarms on Wall Street. And replacing the tariff revenue with another type of tax increase would require Congress to act, while the tariffs would be a legacy decision made by a previous president. 'Congress may not be excited about taking such a politically risky vote when they didn't have to vote on tariffs in the first place,' Tedeschi said. Some in Washington are already starting to think about how they could spend the tariff revenue. Trump recently floated the possibility of sending Americans a cash rebate for the tariffs, and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., recently introduced legislation to send $600 to many Americans. 'We have so much money coming in, we're thinking about a little rebate, but the big thing we want to do is pay down debt,' Trump said last month of the tariffs. Democrats, once they return to power, may face a similar temptation to use the tariff revenue to fund a new social program, especially if raising taxes in Congress proves as challenging as it has in the past. As it is, Democrats have been divided over tariffs. Maintaining the status quo may be an easier political option than changing trade policy. Advertisement 'That's a hefty chunk of change,' Tyson Brody, a Democratic strategist, said of the tariffs. 'The way that Democrats are starting to think about it is not that 'these will be impossible to withdraw.' It's: 'Oh, look, there's now going to be a large pot of money to use and reprogram.'' Of course, the tariffs could prove unpopular, and future elected officials may want to take steps that could lower consumer prices. At the same time, the amount of revenue the tariffs generate could decline over time if companies do, in fact, end up bringing back more of their operations to the United States, reducing the number of goods that face the import tax. 'This is clearly not an efficient way to gather revenue,' said Alex Jacquez, a former Biden official and the chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal group. 'And I don't think it would be a long-term progressive priority as a way to simply collect revenue.' This article originally appeared in
Epoch Times
27 minutes ago
- Epoch Times
Tariff Rates ‘Pretty Much Set,' Says US Trade Representative
President Donald Trump's trade representative, Jamieson Greer, said that Americans should expect the administration's tariff levels to remain where they are, even as some trading partners look to negotiate deals past a key deadline. In an interview with CBS's 'Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan' taped on Aug. 1 but aired on Aug. 3, Greer said he does not expect trading partners that have yet to strike deals with the United States negotiate tariffs down in the coming days.
