In case people are skipping the article. preliminary numbers suggest that the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019.
Were the numbers consistent before this year (2020)? That would help indicate what the variance / increase this year was compared to the past, say, 5-10 years or so.
No. The article even says this; US deaths (unlike most other places) climb every year:
U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted.
One thing the article doesn't say is the size of the usual 'expected' increase, but if I recall correctly it's about 2%. So a 15% jump would be large.
The big question is why is the US so much more badly affected than other places. Sweden, which famously did very little, is on track to see a small increase of perhaps 2%-3% this year over 2018, or just a few thousand deaths, almost not noticeable on the scale of a country.
NB: 2019 in Sweden was the least deadly year for a decade which is one reason comparisons of Sweden vs Norway etc are misleading: the question is not "why did Sweden have higher deaths than Norway in 2020" because it would have done anyway, simply due to catching up from 2019. The question is "why is 2020 going to be a normal year in so many countries but not the USA"?
I think the idea that Sweden did very little has been overplayed. It didn’t do enough, and has suffered for it, but it did quite a lot, and the population was reasonably careful even where not forced.
This is somewhat different to the weird defiant “taking precautions is bad, we must deliberately do high risk things” attitude that seems common in the US.
Sweden quite obviously has not "suffered for it" by any reasonable definition of suffer. Look at the graph I linked to. That is not suffering, it's not even something that'd be noticed normally. 2020 will come in death-wise as basically a normal year for them.
With a population of 330 million and an average life expectancy of about 80 years, we can expect that number to keep climbing. We'd average over 4 million deaths per year maintaining a stable population with the current life expectancy.
