Deaths in Louisiana increased by almost 30% in 2020: How the victims died | News

It is the cycle of life. Every year, about 43,000 Louisianans – more or less – come out of this deadly envelope, the vast majority of them dying from natural causes.

But 2020 was different. The number of deaths recorded in the state jumped to almost a third, a historic and unprecedented change. More than 56,000 Louisianans lost their lives.

The gloomy data belies the arguments that the coronavirus is similar to a strong flu. Coronavirus was the main culprit in the huge increase in deaths: about 7,800 people died of COVID-19 in Louisiana around the time the new year arrived, and the first known death did not occur until mid-March.

But at the same time, another 5,000 excess deaths – 40% of the total – cannot be attributed to the virus – not directly, anyway. Even if COVID deaths were not counted, many more Louisianans died than in a normal year, although the virus is likely to have played a supporting role.

In all, there are now 12,802 fewer Louisianians alive than would be expected from the trends of recent years, a larger population than Mandeville in the parish of St. Tammany.

“Many people who are skeptical of COVID and the impact of COVID have argued that deaths are being overestimated,” said Mark VanLandingham, a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. “I am very confident that even (this analysis) will underestimate the real impact of COVID.”

Louisiana’s experience follows the national scene. The United States’ Centers for Disease Control estimates that there have been between about 493,600 and about 610,000 excess deaths across the country since the pandemic began, with between 60,000 and 158,000 not directly attributable to the coronavirus.

A dramatic increase in deaths began to gain momentum as the state was closing for the first wave of the coronavirus in March, suggesting that the pandemic itself played a role, even though the virus was not listed on all death certificates.

The latest counts, based on preliminary data from the Louisiana Department of Health, suggest a complex web of causes of death that complicate black and white debates over whether the state should be closed to suppress the pandemic or open the door to prevent the depression takes a toll.

A sharp increase in deaths from natural causes, for example, indicates that fears that the health system would be overburdened and that all measures should be taken to allow a quick return to normal medical care were well-founded. At the same time, many of the deaths apparently came from people who were unable or unwilling to seek care in that crisis. And it seems that, from a sharp increase in deaths from drug overdoses, the concern that the pandemic would exacerbate the so-called “deaths from despair” were equally prophetic.

And even with the pandemic once again under better control in Louisiana, experts remain concerned that its impact will continue and, ultimately, be unknown. Researchers are likely to spend years struggling to account for the years that took lives from missed cancer tests, analyzing what led people to take a syringe and measuring the subtle ways that month after month of relentless stress can decrease health.

“I don’t think we have a good understanding of that,” said Patricia Kissinger, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Tulane University. “Like Katrina, we may never know the effects of the echo.”

If COVID is excluded, the category of deaths that presented, by far, the biggest numerical jump in 2020 were deaths due to other natural causes. The reasons for this are obscure, but the data and evidence suggest that many people died of other causes because they did not receive medical care for serious illnesses, either out of fear of the virus or because care was not available.

The 2020 anomalies do not stop there. Pathologists typically group deaths into four broad categories – natural, accidental, homicide and suicide – with a small fifth group involving cases in which the form of death remains undetermined.

Natural deaths are the norm and represent the vast majority of deaths: 90% or more in most years. As a result, most of the increase was in that category.

Even leaving aside the deaths that the state officially counts as due to the coronavirus, other natural causes – cancer, diseases and chronic conditions – took the lives of more than 3,700 people last year. That is a 9.4% increase and almost half the number of victims directly attributable to the virus.

Some of those who died may have been killed by the virus and never properly diagnosed, although coroners say this is a relatively rare occurrence now that tests are not as difficult to obtain as they were in the first months of the disease’s spread.

The state is still compiling the details of death records from the last months of 2020, so the specific diseases that killed these people remain somewhat obscure. But serious and chronic illnesses seem to have played an important role.

Authorities warned of the need not to allow the pandemic to disrupt necessary medical care, with health departments worrying that people would be prevented from going to the doctor or postponing the 9-1-1 call until it was too late, for fear of the virus.

The coronavirus “will take people away from care that otherwise would not have been in a pandemic, they would have received the care they needed to make the condition worse,” said VanLandingham. “But they are taking too long to go to the doctor and see people.”

For example, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease killed more people in the first nine months of 2020 than would be expected over an entire year, based on average death records in recent years. Heart disease and Alzheimer’s also appear to have significantly exceeded expected rates.

Also worrying: although malnutrition remains a relatively rare cause of death, it appears to be on the rise. Nutritional deficiencies were listed as the cause of death for almost 300 people in the state in 2020, a colossal increase of 50% over the average of previous years.

More directly, deaths from respiratory diseases, which could reflect undiagnosed cases of COVID, looked set to surpass recent years.

Louisiana’s statistics largely reflect national trends.

Accidental deaths are usually the second largest category after natural deaths, and in recent years, in the midst of the national opioid epidemic, the biggest factor in this number has been drug overdoses. Accidental deaths in Louisiana jumped nearly a third across the state in 2020, as Louisiana’s fatal overdose rate increased more rapidly than in any other state.

But the burden was not evenly distributed. The already high number of drug overdose deaths in East Baton Rouge, for example, almost doubled in 2020. Overdoses jumped in half at Jefferson Parish. Many other parishes have seen minor increases, although almost no parish in the state has seen its accidental death count drop.

Homicides, on the other hand, represent a small part of the total deaths in Louisiana, although Louisiana has had the highest homicide rate in the country in three consecutive decades. The state was not immune to the increase in violence seen in the U.S. in 2020, with more than 850 dead. This is 45% more than the total in recent years.

Perhaps surprisingly, due to the stress of the pandemic, suicides in Louisiana fell slightly over the year. However, suicide orders can take longer than other death investigations, and some officials are reluctant to declare that someone committed suicide, doing so only when the intention is crystal clear.

As the coronavirus pandemic hit Louisiana, the increasing number of deaths has become a sad but familiar statistic.

Sober as they may be, last year’s numbers may be just the beginning. Experts warn that the persistent effects of the pandemic and the long-term uncertain effects of the virus itself may continue to be felt for years to come.

“This is unmapped water,” said VanLandingham. “There may be many premature deaths in the future for people who have this. We just don’t know. “

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