COVID-19 likely Iowa’s 3rd leading cause of death for 2020

DES MOINES - As it turns out, COVID-19 is far worse than the flu.

COVID-19 likely will go down as the third-leading cause of death in Iowa in 2020, when 4,667 Iowans were confirmed to have died as a result of the disease by Dec. 31, public health data show.

Iowa's first COVID-19 death was recorded March 24, 2020, of a person identified by the state as a Dubuque County resident between 61 and 80 years old.

If the state's five-year averages for causes of death hold, only cancer and heart disease will have claimed more Iowans' lives than COVID-19 in 2020.

For the years 2015 to 2019, the most recent for which state data is available, an average of 7,124 Iowans each year died of heart disease and an average of 6,431 Iowans each year died of cancer.

COVID-19 will go down as Iowa's third-leading cause of death, more than double chronic respiratory diseases, accidents, strokes, Alzheimer's and diabetes, according to state data.

And COVID-19 has been far deadlier than influenza, which over those five years claimed the lives of an average of 596 Iowans annually. COVID-19 has claimed more than seven times as many lives in Iowa in an even shorter period.

COVID-19 became such a prolific killer not because it is a particularly lethal disease, but because of its seemingly unchecked spread throughout Iowa and the United States, said Dr. Louis Katz, the Scott County Health Department medical director and an infectious disease specialist.

Katz said COVID-19's infection fatality rate is .7 percent - far deadlier than the seasonal flu, which typically is about .1 percent, but far less deadly than diseases like cancer, which in its most serious forms can have an infection fatality rate of about 90 percent.

COVID-19's numbers surged to the top of Iowa's cause-of-death chart in 2020, Katz said, by the state's high number of infections, which were a result of the disease's uncontrolled spread.

'It's the number of cases that are killing us, the number of infections. It's our failure to control the number of infections that's the issue,” Katz said. 'If you don't control spread, you end up with half a million dead people (in the United States).”

COVID-19 also made 2020 the deadliest year in Iowa on record, and the increase in total deaths over the previous year was dramatic.

Deaths in Iowa jumped more than 15 percent in 2020, according to state data, largely due to those nearly 5,000 COVID-19-related deaths.

That was the far and away the largest one-year increase since 2001, according to state data.

Before that 15 percent spike in 2020, the highest one-year increases over the previous 20 years were just over 3 percent.

Not surprisingly, the worst spike of 2020 deaths came in late November: Over the course of the week that ended Nov. 28, all deaths in Iowa increased nearly 76 percent over the same week in 2019.

Over the course of the pandemic, including so far in 2021 as of Wednesday morning, 5,601 Iowans have died of COVID-19-related causes.

However, COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths have fallen precipitously since that grim winter surge.

As the COVID-19 vaccine is being distributed to more residents each day - the number of Iowans who have finished being inoculated now exceeds 300,000, according to state data - health experts, including Katz, have implored Iowans to remain vigilant with their mitigation efforts like washing hands, social distancing and wearing a mask in public.

'Absolutely the critical message in March of 2021 is don't back off, referring to masking and social and physical distancing,” Katz said.