I actually looked into this a few months ago because I wanted to see how total deaths looked this year compared to previous years. All I could find when I looked on the CDC website is total deaths for 2018 and before. 2019 will probably come out in the next few months.

In addition, because of covid, the CDC does have a running total deaths (covid or not) for the year starting in February. I am sure those numbers are subject to correction after they are reviewed like previous years, but that is the best number we have. So you can use that as well.

When I looked at this back in early September and when I took our total deaths between Feb and August, and then extrapolated that over the year, deaths were on track to go up about 10% compared to 2018.

Now, that is assuming that the monthly death rate I calculated remained consistent, which is a big assumption (I could see the rate going up and I could see it going down). But it was the best I could do.

But if it held up and deaths were up 10% from 2018, that is a rather large jump over a two year period. Although it is not as scary as it seems either.

Because when I compared the change in total deaths between 2016 and 2017 it went up like 2.5% and then 1% from 2017 to 2018. So, if you took the average of those increases and applied it to the 2018 actual to estimate 2019 and then again to 2020, that gives you a very rough estimate of what our deaths would be in 2020 if there wasn't covid. Then if you compare that to the extrapolated 2020 number, it lead to us having 180k more deaths than what we would have expected in a covid-less 2020 based on the past trends.

Now this whole thing made a few assumptions. One was that the last few months in 2020 would see a similar death rate to that of what we saw in February through August (which I mentioned above). The second is that the average annual increase in deaths was a accurate % to use because I was only able to find total deaths for 2016-2018. I couldn't really find it for earlier years from the same source (CDC). that's a small sample size for determining the "average annual % increase in deaths". But again, it was the best I had. I can see if I can find the excel where I did this if anyone wants.

Sorry, I went on a very long tangent because I personally find that data interesting