Why were deaths in the United States skyrocketing? That’s the question experts were asking a year into the pandemic because-even as COVID deaths tallied to the hundreds of thousands-a vast, parallel pattern of non-COVID death was emerging. “Excess death” statistics maintained by the CDC illustrated that Americans were dying in droves amid the pandemic due to causes other than the virus.
Or so it seemed.
Due to fragmented, decentralized, and arcane systems of “death investigation” in this country, more than 100,000 deaths due to COVID may well have been misattributed to other causes. Moreover, vulnerable populations-including communities of color, rural communities, and those facing poverty-may have been even more likely to go uncounted.
The implications are more than merely posterity: each COVID death might have been an opportunity to stop the pandemic from further spreading like wildfire, its effects compounding in the communities already most vulnerable.
