Is coronavirus the leading cause of death in the US? Yes, but no

Some officials are calling coronavirus the leading cause of death in the country, and though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is disputing such claims -- they’re still being made.

On Monday, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen said COVID-19 is America’s number one killer, according to the Raleigh News & Observer.

Why is that? How can there be a difference of opinion over numbers and figures?

Unsupported theory

“There are no data to support that theory,” Jeff Lancashire, a spokesperson for the National Center for Health Statistics, told CNN earlier this month regarding claims that coronavirus was the country’s leading cause of death.

Some experts have made the claim by comparing U.S. coronavirus deaths with estimates of other common causes of death based on CDC stats from previous years. However, the center cautioned against this.

“We have limited data on 2020 deaths by cause, and no final official numbers yet for 2019, but we do know by looking at the final death totals in 2018 for the two leading causes of death in the U.S., Heart Disease and Cancer, there is no way that at this point COVID-19 comes anywhere close to those totals,” Lancashire told CNN.

In 2017, heart disease killed 647,000 Americans, followed by cancer at 599,000, and accidents at 169,000, CDC data shows. The 10th leading cause of death in 2017 was suicide, at 47,000.

As of Monday, coronavirus had killed 41,000 Americans, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Leading cause

While coronavirus may not prove deadlier than heart disease or cancer by the year’s end, there is data showing it has surpassed even those two, on a per-day basis.

One chart, put together by San Diego doctor Maria Danilychev using data from the CDC and worldometers.info, has been tracking U.S. coronavirus fatalities daily using up-to-date information, and comparing them to estimated daily average deaths due to heart disease, cancer and others based on the 2017 CDC data.

The 2017 CDC stats are divided by 365 -- the number of days in a year -- to come up with an average.

For example, the daily number assigned to heart disease is 1,774, because it killed 647,457 that year.

According to Danilychev’s chart, daily COVID-19 deaths have come to far outweigh any other individual cause -- at least for the time being. On April 14, there were 2,407 deaths due to the virus, according to the chart.