COVID-19 was the tenth leading cause of death in the United States in 2023, significantly down from the fourth place a year before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed. Heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injuries – a category of deaths that has surged in recent years mainly due to drug overdoses, were the leading causes of death.

Also, stroke, which was fifth before the pandemic, was now in the fourth position. Although the rise in death rates from stroke started before COVID-19, the percentage increases in those rates grew a year later.

"In 2020, COVID-19 altered the rankings of leading causes of death substantially. The mortality burden of COVID-19 has decreased since then," researchers from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics wrote in an article published by the medical journal JAMA.

The report relied on death certificates from 2019 through 2023. COVID-19 was documented as the underlying or contributing cause of 76,446 deaths in 2023, a 68.9 per cent decrease from the year before. Experts say many elderly people with multiple serious chronic conditions - from kidney disorders to liver disease to Alzheimer’s - died during the COVID-19 pandemic. Diabetes and heart disease also raise the risk of dying from coronavirus.

According to experts, one person dies every 33 seconds from heart disease - the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups across the US. Doctors say there is more work to be done to close the gap even further, including providing access to health care and insurance for traditionally underserved populations.

The report says COVID-19 has been blamed as the "underlying" primary cause for 49,928 deaths in 2023 - less than one-third of the 186,552 deaths primarily blamed on the virus in 2022. When including deaths where it was listed as the contributing factor to other causes of death, the CDC says at least 76,446 deaths last year were associated with it.

However, the rates of the associated deaths remain the worst for Black Americans, compared to other race and ethnicity groups. CDC says COVID-19 deaths could fall further this year after the past winter peaked at levels lower than the previous winter wave. However, a few summer trends say the wave has reached peak levels of infections higher than last summer and so the disease remains better than previous waves.

Experts believe the agency's push to promote COVID-19 vaccines has been a major reason for the number of deaths.

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