Data suggests COVID-19 still leading cause of death in US in 2022: media

Early data suggests COVID-19 was still a leading cause of death in the United States in 2022, CNN said in a recent report.

COVID-19 has killed more than one million people in the United States since the start of the pandemic, and life expectancy has been cut by nearly 2.5 years since 2020, said the report on Tuesday.

An early look at data from 2022 suggests that there were significantly fewer COVID-19 deaths in the third year of the pandemic than in the first two, according to the report.

More than 267,000 people died of COVID-19 in 2022, according to preliminary data from Johns Hopkins University, compared with more than 350,000 COVID-19 deaths in 2020 and more than 475,000 COVID-19 deaths in 2021.

Despite the lower death toll, however, COVID-19 will likely remain the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2022 for the third year in a row, said the report.