New CDC Report Attributes 3,500 Deaths in America to Long COVID

A person is tested for COVID-19 in New York City on May 3, 2022. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Long-term effects from COVID-19 infection, referred to as “long COVID,” are responsible for over 3,500 deaths in the first two and half years of the pandemic, according to a new government report.

The report (pdf), released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is based on death certificate data for deaths that occurred in the United States from January 2020 through June 2022. The data were collected and processed by the National Center for Health Statistics, the CDC’s statistical data arm.

Overall, researchers found 3,544 death records that cited long COVID as a “cause or contributing factor of death.” This accounts for 0.3 percent of all 1,021,487 COVID deaths recorded during this period.

To identify long COVID-related deaths, researchers looked at death certificates that have both the cause-of-death code for COVID-19 and literal text with key terms such as “long COVID,” “post COVID,” “chronic COVID,” “long haul COVID,” “post-acute sequelae of COVID,” “PASC,” and others. The reason, according to the report, is that the cause-of-death code for post-COVID conditions has not yet been implemented in the United States at the time of this analysis.

The Findings

According to the report, people aged 75–84 accounted for the highest percentage of long-COVID-related deaths by age (28.8 percent), followed by those aged 85 and over (28.1 percent) and 65–74 (21.5 percent). By contrast, the highest percentage of COVID-19 deaths occurred among people aged 65–74 (23.8 percent) and 75–84 (23.5 percent), followed by those aged 50–64 (22.6 percent).

The report also shows that men (51.5 percent) accounted for a slightly higher percentage of long COVID-related deaths than women (48.5 percent). The age-adjusted death rate for long COVID was 7.3 per million people for males and 5.5 for females.

When it comes to racial demographics, the data shows that the majority of long COVID-related deaths occurred among non-Hispanic white people (78.5 percent), followed by black people (10.1 percent) and Hispanic people (7.8 percent). All other racial groups accounted for less than 2 percent of such deaths.

CDC Claims Undercounting

Given the way death certificates are filled out, the 3,544 figure could be an undercount, the researchers said.

“The study may underestimate long COVID deaths because clinical guidance for the identification and reporting of PASC has evolved over time and death certificate literal text may contain additional key terms that were not included in this study,” the report read.

“The investigation only included death certificates that listed COVID-19 as a cause of death, and as a result may underestimate deaths where prior COVID-19 infection was not confirmed or suspected but may have contributed to the death.”

Questionable Methodology

While researchers claim that long COVID is responsible for at least 3,500 deaths, critics question whether what the report used as statistical evidence actually points to that conclusion.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and professor at the University of California, San Fransisco, took issue with the methodology and overall integrity of the analysis. He argued that just because certain key words are found on death certificates, it doesn’t necessarily mean that long COVID is as deadly as the report would make it seem.

“Imagine a person hospitalized with COVID, on the vent for 20 days, and then someone wrote [COVID-19] as the cause of death, and then casually said ‘post covid.’ This would be listed as a long covid death,” Prasad wrote in a blog post. “Are you serious?”

“[The CDC] didn’t interview providers,” he continued. “They didn’t review the medical record. They didn’t look in multiple datasets. They didn’t look across countries. They basically didn’t do anything a respectable scientist would before making such a bold, public claim.”

“This is widely used to craft a narrative that long covid can kill, but they have no such evidence,” the professor said.

According to the CDC, post-COVID conditions can include “a wide range of ongoing health problems” that can last weeks, months, or longer. Scientists still don’t know whether these health problems are caused by the virus itself, some other illness, or a combination of both.

In the meantime, the CDC said it’s trying to better identify the most frequent long COVID symptoms and the most common risk factors, better understand how many people are affected by long COVID, and how often people who have been infected with COVID-19 develop long COVID afterward.