(CNN)Even though the coronavirus pandemic continues to take lives

across the United States, Covid-19 has not become the leading cause of

death in the nation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
confirmed to CNN.

"There are no data to support that theory," Jeff Lancashire, a spokesperson

for the National Center for Health Statistics, said in an email on Friday.

US coronavirus deaths pass 14,000, but future projections are better than
expected

False claims declaring that coronavirus has become the leading cause of
death in the US have swirled as the US leads the world in coronavirus cases.
Those claims are made by some experts comparing how many people die of
coronavirus daily with the estimate of how many people may die daily on
average of each leading cause of death, using CDC data.

Track US coronavirus cases on an interactive, real-time map.

In other words -- the claims involve comparing reported deaths from Covid-19
to estimated deaths for leading causes of deaths, which include heart
disease and cancer.

"We have limited data on 2020 deaths by cause, and no final official
numbers yet for 2019, but we do know by looking at the final death totals
in 2018 for the two leading causes of death in the U.S., Heart Disease and
Cancer, there is no way that at this point COVID-19 comes anywhere
close to those totals," Lancashire said in the email.

He noted that between January and April in 2018, more than 234,000
people in the United States died of heart disease and nearly 199,000 died
of cancer.
So far during the coronavirus pandemic, there have been about 16,700
Covid-19 deaths in the United States, according to the latest data from
Johns Hopkins University.