Early days of COVID saw largest spike in alcohol-related deaths in 20 years, study says

Deaths caused by alcohol use in the United States surged during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study.

The study, conducted by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, examined alcohol-induced deaths over a 20-year period and found that after seeing steady annual increases of 7% or less from 2000 to 2018, the rate increased 26% from 2019 to 2020.

“This is the largest increase in the study, period, and it coincides with the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Merianne Rose Spencer, one of the study’s authors, told McClatchy News. “So that goes from 10.4 [deaths] per 100,000 in 2019 to 13.1 per 100,000 in 2020.”

Rates of death shot up for both males and females and across age groups, though rates of death for males were two to four times higher than for females, the study revealed.

For women, alcohol-induced deaths increased across all age groups above age 25. For men, rates of death ticked up across all age groups under 85, according to the study. For both men and women, the rates of alcohol-induced deaths were highest in midlife.

“Within the alcohol-induced bucket of deaths, you can look at specific causes,” Spencer said. “The absolute number of deaths was highest for alcoholic liver disease, followed by mental/behavioral disorders due to alcohol, and then the third highest was accidental poisoning.”

Alcoholic cardiomyopathy and alcohol-induced acute pancreatitis trailed far behind in third and fourth place in terms of causing the total number of deaths, according to the study.

Though this study only used data from 2000 onward, publicly available data from earlier years can be used as a comparison, Spencer noted.

“The way we categorized or classified alcohol-induced deaths could be different, but going back [from] 1999 all the way to 1979, you can see that the rates were never as high as it is in this most recent year.”

As for why the death rates are going up, the study did not offer conclusions, saying only that alcohol use increased at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, “which may have affected mortality rates.”

Life expectancy for Americans decreased in 2020 and 2021, according to the CDC. Chronic liver disease, which can be caused by alcohol abuse, contributed to that decline.

This story was originally published November 4, 2022 at 4:53 PM with the headline "Early days of COVID saw largest spike in alcohol-related deaths in 20 years, study says."