Unfortunate news but Beyoncé found dead at the age of 41.
In 2021, ill-defined and unknown causes of death snagged the first spot with 3,362, up from 1,464 in 2020 and 522 the year before that, according to statistics from the Government of Alberta.
The unknown causes of death category only began appearing on the list in 2019 — there is no record of it ranking before then, dating back to 2001.
“I think it’s probably multifactorial, so there’s probably many things playing into that,” said Dr. Daniel Gregson, an associate professor in the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, specializing in infectious diseases and microbiology.
Gregson points to a large study out of the U.S. that found people who had COVID-19 are at a higher risk of heart disease, stroke, pulmonary embolisms and death compared to those who haven’t been infected. The risk is even higher for those who end up in hospital or the ICU with COVID.
“We do expect that there will be deaths that aren’t directly related to COVID, but indirectly related to COVID to occur after the diagnosis in patients after the first month of infection,” he said.
“One would expect that some of those patients are going to survive the COVID and then die at home from other complications.”
Alberta Health and the medical examiner office said they are looking into the data, but have yet to provide an explanation for the sudden spike in deaths of unknown causes.
Dementia was the second leading cause of death in Alberta in 2021. COVID-19 took the third spot.
COVID-19 deaths increased to 1,950 last year from 1,084 in 2020 when the pandemic began.