U.S. COVID-19 Deaths in 2022: Down 47%, and Increasingly at Home or in Nursing Homes

In 2022, COVID-19 was the underlying or a contributing cause of 244,986 deaths in the United States. That was still a heavy toll — but the age-adjusted death rate fell 47 percent from 2021, from 115.6 to 61.3 per 100,000 people. The provisional death-certificate data also show the nature of COVID-19 deaths changing.

Who died

Death rates were highest among people aged 85 and older, non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaska Native people, and males.

Where

How the deaths changed

• Contributing, not only underlying. In the first two years of the pandemic, COVID-19 was the underlying cause on about 90 percent of death certificates that listed it. In 2022 it was 76 percent; in the other 24 percent, it contributed to a death primarily caused by something else.
• Outside the hospital. Most COVID-19 deaths still happened in hospital (59 percent), but a growing share happened at home (15 percent) or in nursing homes and long-term care facilities (14 percent).

About the data

The National Center for Health Statistics compiles these figures from death certificates through the National Vital Statistics System. Provisional data, based on records received by April 2, 2023 (more than 99 percent of 2022 deaths), give an early signal of shifts in mortality before final data are released. They may change; reporting speed varies by jurisdiction; and race and ethnicity, especially for American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian and Hispanic people, can be misclassified on death certificates, so some groups' rates may be under- or overestimated.

Sources

Based on "COVID-19 Mortality Update — United States, 2022," by Farida B. Ahmad, Jodi A. Cisewski, Jiaquan Xu and Robert N. Anderson of CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a work of the United States government in the public domain.