Death rates by age group in the Covid years and beyond

This is an update on how death rates for each age group have changed since pre-Covid days. In this article, I cover US death rates by 10-year age groups from 2018 thru 2024.

Spoilers

• The good news: Out of 11 age groups, 7 ended up in 2024 with about the same or a little lower death rate than they had in 2018.

• The bad news: The 4 remaining age groups ended up in 2024 with a substantially higher death rate than they had in 2018—and sadly, those age groups include young children aged 1-4 and 5-14, along with adults aged 35-44 and 85+.

What are death rates?

The death rate is the number of deaths in a population, divided by the size of the population.

For example, in 2018, there were 21,467 deaths of infants less than 1 year old, and the population of infants less than 1 year old was 3,848,208, so the death rate was 0.00558.

Since saying the death rate is a small fraction like “0.00558” doesn’t mean anything to most people, the death rate is usually multiplied by 10,000 or 100,000, which gives us the number of deaths that occurred per 10,000 or 100,000 people—a concept most people intuitively understand.  

Death rates by age group

Chart 1 shows death rates per 100,000 by 10-year age groups from 2018 through 2024. Each colored line represents a different age group.

In general, death rates increase with age, with people 85+ having by far the highest death rate—double or triple that of the next oldest age group, which is 75-84-year-olds.

However, there are a couple of exceptions to this age progression: The first is infants, who have a death rate on par with the middle-aged. The death rate for infants less than 1 year old consistently falls between that of 45-54-year olds and 55-64-year olds. The second exception is that death rates among young children aged 1-4 are consistently higher than they are for older children aged 5-14.

Chart 1: US death rates per 100,000 by 10-year age groups. See Note 1 for the source of this data.

Table 1: Percent change in death rate compared to 2018. See Note 1 for the source of this data.

All age groups 15 years old and older experienced a substantial increase in death rate in 2020, and even more so in 2021. Table 1 shows the percentage change in death rate for each age group, comparing each year to 2018. I used 2018 rather than 2019 as a comparison year, so we could start by looking at the percent change in a typical year, like 2019.

The percent change in death rate is highlighted with a red-yellow-green gradient, with the highest increases in red, and the lowest in green.

Table 2: Change in the number of deaths compared to 2018. See Note 1 for the source of this data.

Table 2 shows the actual change in the number of deaths each year, compared to 2018. Again, the numbers are highlighted with a red-yellow-green gradient, with the highest death numbers in red, and the lowest in green. I included these numbers to provide a fuller picture of the situation.

For example, an increase in death rate for 5-14-year-olds from 13 per 100k in 2018, to 15 per 100k in 2022, may not sound like much, especially compared to death rates among the elderly. But, it was a 15% increase in the death rate, and translated to 789 more deaths among 5-14-year-olds in 2022 than there were in 2018—that’s a lot of children.

As you can see in Table 2, numerically speaking, most deaths occur among the elderly—this is true every year, not just during the Covid years, so nothing changed in that regard.

However, as you can see in Table 1, in terms of the percentage change in death rate, the hardest hit by far were younger and middle-aged adults, even though the total numbers of dead were lower.

Observations

Infants less than 1 year old fared the best—but they started and ended in a relatively poor position, with a typical death rate on par with the middle-aged.

Adults aged 35-44 fared the worst, with a death rate that skyrocketed in 2020, and has remained substantially higher than normal ever since.

One of the most alarming points was the substantial increase in death rate among 1-4-year-olds and 5-14-year-olds in both 2022 and 2023—when death rates for all other age groups were falling. This oddity warrants additional investigation, since the Covid vaccines were introduced in late 2020. Did the children who died get the Covid vax? Did their parents get the Covid vax prior to their birth? Have we all forgotten how new this vax is and how little is known about its effects in real life? In a sane world, a possible Covid vaccine connection to the increased death rate among children would be aggressively investigated—but we do not live in a sane world.

In 2019, the last normal pre-Covid year, death rates for all age groups were similar to 2018, ranging between a 2% and a -3% change.

In 2020, all age groups 15 and older had substantial increases in death rate compared to 2018, ranging from a low of 13% for age 85+, to a high of 27% for age 35-44.

In 2021, death rates increased even more compared to 2018 for all age groups except infants less than 1 year, and were especially high among ages 15 to 64, including a massive increase in death rate of 48% among adults age 35-44.

Death rates began to decline in 2022—that is, for all age groups except children aged 1-4 and 5-14, whose death rate jumped dramatically.

Can vaccines cover for democide?

I just came across a terrifying headline: “3 Decades Wiped from Life Expectancy of Covid-Vaxxed. And it will only get worse over time...”

“Shockwaves have been sent rippling through the scientific community after a study found that around 30 years have been wiped from the average life expectancy of people who received at least two doses of Covid mRNA ‘vaccines,’” we are told. How do you think a dire warning like that might affect someone’s life, if it were truly taken to heart? My inclination is that its impact could be devastating.

I haven’t looked at the study behind this headline, but I have a hunch we will be seeing a lot of it. For one, because a deadly vaccine we all signed off on is a great distraction from the 1.3 million excess US deaths during the Covid years, which remain unexplained, and which point to a possible covert mass-murder (a democide).

I hope when you read headlines like this, you will keep in mind (and share) this mortality data, so we can all try to keep a level head . Will anyone mention any suspicion, based on the US mortality data, that children could be at particular risk? Or will everyone stick to generalized fear-mongering suitable for terrifying people of all ages, even though death rates are normal again in the US for most age groups?

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NOTES

1) To run this saved search, use this link: http://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D176/D432F215

Suggested Citation: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. National Vital Statistics System, Provisional Mortality on CDC WONDER Online Database. Data are from the final Multiple Cause of Death Files, 2018-2023, and from provisional data for years 2024 and later, as compiled from data provided by the 57 vital statistics jurisdictions through the Vital Statistics Cooperative Program. Accessed at http://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd-icd10-provisional.html on Apr 12, 2025 1:05:48 AM