More than 3 million people died in the United States in 2024, and globally, tens of millions of deaths occur each year from a combination of chronic disease, infectious illness, and preventable causes. If it feels like death is everywhere in the news, that’s partly because the pandemic drew sustained public attention to mortality data for the first time in a generation. But the forces driving most deaths today are longer-term trends that were building well before COVID-19.
The Biggest Killers Are Chronic Diseases
Heart disease and stroke together kill roughly 20 million people worldwide every year. In 2021 alone, cardiovascular disease accounted for an estimated 19.91 million global deaths, with stroke responsible for 7.44 million of those. These are not sudden epidemics. They reflect decades of rising rates of high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and sedentary lifestyles across nearly every country. In wealthy nations, better emergency care has improved survival after a heart attack, but the sheer number of people developing cardiovascular disease continues to climb as populations age and diets shift toward processed food.
Cancer is the other major chronic killer. In the United States, an estimated 618,120 cancer deaths are projected for 2025, alongside more than 2 million new diagnoses. Lung, colorectal, pancreatic, and breast cancers remain the most lethal types. Mortality rates have actually been falling for decades thanks to earlier detection and better treatment, but the total number of cancer deaths stays high because the population is growing and aging. Cancer is fundamentally a disease of accumulated cellular damage over time, so the older a population gets, the more cancer it produces.
COVID-19 Changed the Landscape
COVID-19 remains one of the leading causes of death globally, ranking among the top infectious disease killers alongside lower respiratory infections and tuberculosis. At its peak, the pandemic caused massive spikes in excess mortality, meaning far more people died than would have been expected based on pre-2020 trends. While those acute surges have subsided, COVID continues to contribute tens of thousands of deaths annually in the US alone, primarily among older adults and people with weakened immune systems.
The pandemic also had indirect effects on mortality. Delayed cancer screenings, disrupted treatment for chronic conditions, increased substance use, and rising mental health crises all contributed to deaths that wouldn’t have occurred under normal circumstances. Some of these knock-on effects are still playing out years later.
The US Death Rate Is Actually Falling
Despite the sense that death is accelerating, the age-adjusted death rate in the United States dropped 3.8% between 2023 and 2024, landing at 722 deaths per 100,000 people. That decline reflects the continued retreat of pandemic-era mortality and improvements in managing some chronic conditions. In total, 3,072,039 deaths occurred in the US in 2024.
But that national average hides significant disparities. The age-adjusted death rate for Black Americans was 884 per 100,000, compared to 332.3 for multiracial individuals, the lowest of any group. Men died at substantially higher rates than women (844.8 versus 613.5 per 100,000). These gaps are driven by differences in access to healthcare, exposure to environmental hazards, rates of chronic disease, and socioeconomic stress. Cancer disparities are especially stark: Native American people bear the highest cancer mortality of any group, with death rates two to three times higher than White people for kidney, liver, stomach, and cervical cancers. Black people have roughly double the mortality of White people for prostate, stomach, and uterine cancers.
Overdose Deaths Are Dropping, But Still Devastating
Drug overdoses killed an estimated 54,743 Americans in 2024 involving opioids, a sharp decline of nearly 27% from the 83,140 opioid-involved overdose deaths recorded in 2023. That’s the largest single-year drop on record and likely reflects expanded access to the overdose-reversal medication naloxone, shifts in the illicit drug supply, and broader public health interventions. Still, 54,000 deaths in a single year from one category of drugs is extraordinary by any historical standard. Before 2015, the US had never recorded more than 35,000 total overdose deaths from all drugs combined in a year.
Heat, Pollution, and Environmental Causes
Climate change is emerging as an increasingly measurable contributor to global mortality. Heat-related deaths among people over 65 have risen 70% over the past two decades, according to the World Health Organization. Extreme heat strains the cardiovascular system, worsens respiratory conditions, and can be fatal for people who lack access to cooling. Air pollution, much of it linked to fossil fuel combustion, kills millions each year by contributing to lung disease, heart attacks, and stroke.
These deaths tend to be invisible in headline statistics because they’re recorded as heart failure, respiratory arrest, or kidney failure rather than “death from heat” or “death from pollution.” But population-level data makes the pattern clear: as temperatures rise and air quality worsens, more people die from conditions that heat and pollution make worse.
Why It Feels Like More People Are Dying
Part of the answer is simple math. The global population is larger and older than it has ever been. More people alive means more people dying each year, even if the rate at which people die at any given age is improving. In the US, the baby boom generation is now entering its late 70s and 80s, the ages when mortality rates climb steeply. This demographic wave will push raw death counts higher for the next two decades regardless of medical advances.
Another factor is visibility. The pandemic normalized real-time death tracking in a way that had never existed before. Daily death tolls, excess mortality dashboards, and public health reporting created an awareness of mortality data that most people had never engaged with. That awareness hasn’t fully faded, so deaths that would have gone unremarked in 2018 now feel more salient.
Finally, several genuine crises have overlapped. The opioid epidemic, though now improving, killed more Americans between 2020 and 2023 than in any comparable period. COVID added a new layer of infectious disease mortality on top of existing chronic disease burdens. And climate-related deaths are trending upward in a way that compounds existing risks for vulnerable populations. None of these alone explains the feeling that death is everywhere, but together they create a period where mortality feels, and in some ways is, unusually present in public life.