@40westwx
couple clarifications.
1. The US population increased by about 957,000 in 2019 not 6 million. Maybe you saw 6% which is the avg rate increase over the last 20 years and misinterpreted that. But the rate has been dropping steadily in recent years.
2. a relatively small change in the mortality % is really significant when applied to 329 million people! Your talking about hundreds of thousands of people with just a fraction of a % change.
3. deaths from heart disease are up not down.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-the-heart-attack-death-rate-has-doubled-during-covid-19
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/07/10/more-people-are-dying-during-the-pandemic-and-not-just-from-covid-19
4. One number in isolation doesn’t give a clear picture when dealing with an issue that has multiple variables. You need to control for all the variables. This could work either way. Deaths from things like heart disease have gone up due to people in some cases being reluctant to get treatment. But there is evidence some other death rates have gone down. Even though the % of accidents that are fatal has gone up die to wreck less driving on less crowded roads because the sheer volume of accidents is so down the overall mortality decreases. There are various other factors needed to be calculated. That could end up pushing the conclusion you infer in either direction but it can’t be known until it is done. I’ll let the expert statisticians who are paid to do that...do it before I draw conclusions.