The number of COVID-19 deaths in the US since the pandemic began topped 700,000 in October. This makes the virus the nation’s third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.
Those numbers are preliminary, and the official data will not be complete until at least a year after the government officially ends the public health emergency for the pandemic. With both the provisional and official data tracking causes of death, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) requires anyone certifying death information to follow international standards from the World Health Organization.
When an individual dies, there’s often multiple contributing conditions or factors. Those can create challenges for tracking the cause of death in government data.
