COVID deaths drop by half on Long Island, in U.S.
Vaccines, as well as prior infections and less-serious variants, have led to a drop in COVID-19 deaths, experts say. Credit: Howard Schnapp
The number of people dying of COVID-19-related causes on Long Island and nationwide continued to fall sharply in 2025, a trend that experts say is primarily because previous COVID-19 infections and vaccines have strengthened our bodies’ ability to fight the virus, and because the coronavirus itself is less likely to cause severe disease than a few years ago.
In addition, when people are hospitalized with COVID-19, doctors have more strategies, therapies and medications than during the early years of the pandemic, said Dr. Javed Iqbal, chief of pulmonary and critical care at Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow.
In the beginning, "we didn't know much about COVID-19," he said. "But now our understanding is much, much better."
Nationwide, 20,536 people died of COVID-19-related causes in 2025, down from 47,539 in 2024 and a fraction of the 463,267 who died in 2021, according to provisional Centers for Disease Control and Prevention death certificate data.
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The number of deaths from COVID-19 on Long Island and nationwide fell sharply in 2025, continuing a trend since the devastating early years of the pandemic.
Nationwide, nearly 20,500 died of COVID-19-related causes in 2025, down from more than 47,500 in 2024, and 23 times fewer people than who died in 2021. Long Island has had similar trends.
The decline is because previous infections and vaccines have strengthened our immune systems’ abilities to fight the virus, and because the virus itself is less likely to cause severe disease than in the past.
In about two-thirds of deaths associated with COVID-19, death certificates list it as the underlying cause of death; the others list it as a contributing cause.
Deaths declined in New York at a similar rate — from about 2,900 in 2024 to about 1,350 in 2025, CDC data shows. Numbers aren’t exact because they are based on deaths each week, and some weeks straddle years.
On Long Island, the number of people who died of COVID-19-related causes fell from about 410 in 2024 to about 220 in 2025, according to state Health Department data that only includes deaths in hospitals, nursing homes and adult care facilities and not, for example, in homes.
Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of public health and epidemiology for Northwell Health, said a pivot point came in 2022, when the Omicron COVID-19 variant — which typically is milder than previous variants — became dominant.
"It turned out to evolve into a less virulent organism," he said.
Dr. Martín Bäcker, an infectious disease physician at NYU Langone Hospital–Long Island in Mineola and principal investigator at the hospital’s vaccine center, said almost everyone has had COVID-19 at least once, and in many cases multiple times, and most people have received one or more vaccines. So our immune systems now recognize COVID-19 when there’s a new infection and "respond more rapidly than with initial infections," he said.
That’s why people usually get less sick from COVID-19 with each subsequent infection, although other factors also influence severity, including how much time you are exposed to an infected person, he said.
At the beginning of the pandemic, deaths from COVID-19 dwarfed those from the flu. But today, a severe flu season can lead to more deaths than during a year of COVID-19, CDC data shows.
In the 2024-25 flu season, which was the worst in seven years, an estimated 38,000 people died from flu-related causes, according to a CDC analysis.
As with the flu, conditions such as heart disease, lung disease, diabetes and obesity increase the risk of severe COVID-19, according to the CDC.
But today, few people who die of COVID-19 have a typical case of one of those conditions and nothing more, doctors say. There usually are complications, and patients often also have other significant medical issues.
"It’s poorly controlled [diabetes], or more severe cases," Iqbal said. "Besides diabetes, they have other medical illnesses like heart disease" or the lung disease COPD.
Still, older people and people with medical conditions like diabetes should get the current COVID-19 vaccine, Farber said.
"It may not cause their death," he said of COVID-19, "but it certainly can cause them to wind up in the hospital, to be sick."
Multiple studies show that repeated infections increase the risk of long COVID, a chronic condition that millions of Americans have that continues at least three months after a COVID-19 infection and can include a variety of symptoms.
Farber said most data on long COVID comes from pre-Omicron infections, and more research is needed on the current risk of long COVID from repeated infections.
David Olson covers health care. He has worked at Newsday since 2015 and previously covered immigration, multicultural issues and religion at The Press-Enterprise in Southern California.
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