Death rates remain higher than expected post-pandemic

New research from the University of Minnesota shows that death rates for early adults, or adults aged 25–44, rose sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic and remain higher than expected post-pandemic.

Heightened death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic intensified an already negative trend for early adults, which began around 2010. As a result, early adult death rates in 2023 were about 70% higher than they might have been if death rates had not begun to rise about a decade before the pandemic.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota and Boston University analyzed death rates between 1999–2023. The study, published in JAMA Network Open, found:

• For early adults, there was a large jump in the death rate between 2019 and 2021, which are considered the core pandemic years. In 2023, the death rate remained nearly 20% higher than in 2019.
• Drug-related deaths are the single largest cause of 2023 excess mortality, compared with the mortality that would have been expected had earlier trends continued.
• Other important contributing causes were a variety of natural causes, including cardiometabolic and nutritional causes, and a variety of other external causes, including transport deaths.

“The rise in opiate deaths has been devastating for Americans in early and middle adulthood,” said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, lead author and an associate professor in the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts and Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation.

“What we didn’t expect is how many different causes of death have really grown for these early adults. It’s drug and alcohol deaths, but it’s also car collisions, it’s circulatory and metabolic diseases—causes that are very different from each other. That tells us this isn’t one simple problem to fix, but something broader.”

“Our findings underscore the urgent need for comprehensive policies to address the structural factors driving worsening health among recent generations of young adults,” said author Andrew Stokes of Boston University. “Solutions may include expanding access to nutritious foods, strengthening social services and increasing regulation of industries that affect public health.”

Future research will explore ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the trends that were already in place when it began.