For the first year since COVID-19 upended our lives, the number of deaths from all causes is expected to fall under 300,000 in the Golden State, closer to pre-pandemic normals.
The decline is primarily due to fewer COVID deaths — there have been close to 6,000 deaths from the virus so far this year, compared to over 18,000 at this time last year. To date, the virus as killed more than 104,000 Californians.
Although the final tally is not yet in, the lower death projections are evidence that with effective vaccines and three years of experience and exposure, COVID has taken its place alongside flu and pneumonia as an endemic disease. But they both can still kill.
From 2017 through 2019, about 270,000 people died each year from all causes in the Golden State. In 2020, the first year with COVID in the mix, annual deaths shot up to over 315,000 and grew to nearly 330,000 lives lost in 2021. Last year 310,000 deaths were reported, still 15% higher than pre-pandemic averages.
Dr. Bob Wachter, the UC-San Francisco medical department chair, has seen the change first-hand in his hospital. “COVID deaths have come down significantly… a manifestation of widespread immunity,” he said.
“The last three years, not only were there a lot of deaths from COVID, there were a lot of additional deaths from non-COVID causes, which are probably attributable to people not receiving the medical care that they normally would have received” when ERs were overflowing with COVID patients, Wachter noted.
“And it seems like both of those are improving,” he said, now that our access to health care is also returning to normal.
If the rest of 2023 mirrors last November and December, California would end up reporting about 295,000 total deaths, the lowest since the start of the pandemic.
The final tally will depend on how the next few weeks of respiratory virus season goes. Last week, Bay Area public health officers announced the three big respiratory viruses are all on the rise: COVID, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
And in this new post-pandemic era, public health officials are finding new ways to inform the public when there is more virus in the air, while also accepting that COVID is here to stay.
One step in that direction? Last week the California Department of Public Health released a new respiratory virus dashboard that will track testing, hospitalizations and deaths for the flu and for COVID side-by-side, a replacement for the COVID dashboard.
“Why not take advantage of better tools and increased public interest in [respiratory viruses]… mirroring what has been produced for COVID,” Wachter said of the new dashboard. “I think that’s progress.”
While this year’s COVID deaths are lower, they still greatly outnumber annual flu deaths.
During the first two years of the pandemic, California reported record lows for flu deaths, a result of social distancing and masking to stop the spread of COVID.
Now flu has also started to return to pre-pandemic levels. Flu season usually peaks some time between December and February, and with hospitalizations on the rise, flu deaths for this respiratory season will continue into the New Year.
Although COVID killed more than 33,000 Californians in 2020, and nearly 45,000 in 2021, heart disease and cancer continued to claim the most lives every year in California. Of the 243,000 deaths in the first 10 months of 2023, 51,000 people died from heart disease, and 50,000 people died of cancer, followed by accidents, strokes and Alzheimer’s — each of which killed between 13,000 and 15,000 people.