Not really? I don’t think causes of death are announced to the public very often. I can’t find causes of death on any of my family members and I have direct links to their death announcements or whatever they are called.
Obituaries? Obits are created by the family usually, so they have full control over what goes into it, so you very rarely see them give an indication of what caused the death beyond general terms like "illness" or whatever.
you can get the death certificate which is public record, but has limited CoD info. if they were rich/famous the hospital will go into more detail. For most people that will be the limit of public info, unless they suspect something criminal
Depends on the state. Who can request a death cert (or any vital record for that matter), and what level of detail in a death certificate, is typically defined on a state by state basis. Certain classifications of family member or governmental/legal entities are usually the most common allowable classifications of approved individuals to request a person's DC. Brad lived in Cali, right? Pretty sure in memory serves the authorized copies are limited to family/funeral homes for the most part. In your celeb example, hospitals won't release shit because they are usually governed by HIPAA, since that is still protected health information.
If the death was unattended, then typically a coroner is going to have to take the case by law in the state. Depending on the county/state, there can sometimes be a backlog due to toxicology testing if the coroner/ME is requesting that to be done (in a lot of cases, they defer finalizing the cause/manner of death until they get tox results back). Alcohol testing is easy to conduct, the drug testing is usually what holds everything up since they have to test for a whole laundry list of substances, both legal and illegal (especially if they have to use a state lab or some company like NMS Labs that handles requests across the country).
Causes of death are also "tiered" on some death certs. Sometimes the family will just disclose the first tier, which might be something super generic like "cardiac arrest" or "respiratory arrest". All that means is the heart stopped or breathing stopped...which is technically how all people die. It's the other causes tiered under that which usually give you more information on what actually contributed to the death. If a death certificate literally only had cardiac arrest or respiratory arrest as the only cause of death, that basically means the coroner/medical examiner has no clue how/why the person died, but if they can list a manner of death (natural, accident, suicide, homicide, undetermined), they've been able to at least rule out certain things. Except undetermined obviously lol
