An eye-popping stat: US death rate jumps by nearly 16 percent amid COVID-19 pandemic

Today: COVID-19 killed a staggering number of people, fueling a major spike in the US death rate. New documents show how a former Trump official pursued scattershot deals for medical supplies, and Pfizer reported good news about its COVID vaccine in adolescents.

We’ll start with sobering numbers:

An eye-popping stat: US death rate jumps by nearly 16 percent amid COVID-19 pandemic

The death rate in the United States jumped by 15.9 percent between 2019 and 2020, fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Wednesday.

The coronavirus was responsible for about 1 in 10 deaths in the country in 2020, and was the third-leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer.

The breakdown: 

Heart disease: 690,000 deaths

Cancer: 598,000 deaths

COVID-19: 345,000 deaths

Overall, COVID-19 was the underlying cause of about 345,000 deaths last year and was a contributing cause for another roughly 32,000, which together is 11.3 percent of all deaths in the country last year, the CDC said.

While new deaths from the virus have fallen significantly from their peaks in January, there are still about 1,000 people dying from COVID-19 every day.