evidence: Looking at official statistics alone, COVID-19 was the fifth leading cause of death globally, accounting for nearly one in twenty deaths worldwide since the beginning of 2020. After accounting for unreported deaths, the total toll could be as high as the third leading cause of death, responsible for an estimated 17.9 million deaths, or one out of every ten deaths. About half of people globally live to 70 before they die, so causes of death that tend to kill older adults including ischemic heart disease and stroke predominate the most common causes of death. COVID-19 is similar in that it kills very few young children or adolescents but becomes sharply more dangerous with age, disproportionately killing people over 70 years old. An analysis found that different age structures, or the fraction of the population is in different age groups, could explain almost half of the variation in the risk of mortality between countries. [...] When the causes of death are ranked in this article, it assumes that estimates for non-COVID-19 causes would remain the same in the absence of COVID-19. This may not be true. During the pandemic, researchers have noticed decreases in injuries and road traffic deaths due to lower mobility; decreases in routine health-care utilization, potentially affecting mortality due to chronic but treatable diseases; decreases in other respiratory diseases like pneumonia; and other changes in disease burden. Another consideration could be that in locations with complete or near complete vital registration systems, like the United States, deaths originally determined as a non-COVID-19 cause were in fact caused by COVID-19, potentially changing the ranking of causes of death presented in this post.