State Level Excess Mortality – 3/23/22

/ bs king / Leave a comment

Well hello again! Paid work delayed this post for a little bit, so I’m interested to see after 7 weeks where we’re going to land. Last time I posted we had just gone over 1 million excess deaths since 2/1/20, and as of this week we are just under 1.1 million. Hopefully things are settling down now, and I’ll be interested to see where the 2021 numbers are as well. I’m also going to throw in an extra bit about official COVID deaths vs excess mortality, as my state made some major adjustments to the official numbers this month.

Ready? Let’s go!

Excess Mortality Above Average

First up, the map. When I posted 7 weeks ago, the range at the bottom was 881-5245 deaths/million residents. Now it’s 1020-5729 deaths/million. The top states continue to rise faster than the bottom ones. It’s amazing to think that in the top states one out of every 200 people who was alive at the beginning of the pandemic is now an excess death. As always, that’s in addition to those expected to die anyway.

I was surprised to see West Virginia suddenly sticking out more than previously, and was curious to see how that showed up in the numbers. The difference was pretty clear:

StateExcess Deaths
Above Average
2/1/20-3/23/22		Change from
2/2/22		Change in
Rank
Mississippi5729+484No change
Arizona4948+328No change
Alabama4768+463No change
West Virginia4710+1081+6
New Mexico4642+455-1
Tennessee4400+454+1
Arkansas4363+390-2
Louisiana4269+299-2
South Carolina4202+833+10
Montana4172+293-2

West Virginia and South Carolina had a lousy winter it appears. They were the two states that gained the most excess deaths in the last 7 weeks. Here are the rest of the top 10:

State3/23/22
Excess		2/2/22
Excess		DifferenceMar RankFeb Rank
West Virginia471036291081410
South Carolina42023369833919
North Carolina255620275294245
Oklahoma407735755021211
Kentucky397134804911315
Mississippi5729524548411
Alabama4768430546333
New Mexico4642418745554
Tennessee4400394645467
Rhode Island303325934403134

Looking back at my old post, I had noted that West Virginia reporting had been quite sparse since Thanksgiving 2021, so it’s likely some of that jump is them catching up with deaths they should have filed much earlier. Let’s see if that shows up in the 2021 totals.

Percent Excess Mortality – 2020 and 2021

Looks like some of them did! North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia added 10+ percentage points to their 2021 excess mortality total since 7 weeks ago. Seems like a data dump. Again, the asterisked states added 2% or more to their total, and the ones highlighted in green are in the top 10.

State2020 deaths – actual2020 deaths – expectedPercent Increase 20202021 deaths – reported2021 deaths – expectedPercent Increase 2021
Alabama625505473114%673875502222%
Alaska4971443412%5996457431%*
Arizona759556427118%824376378929%
Arkansas374323345212%399793347219%
California31543028270412%33604227499222%
Colorado471614140414%487804127918%
Connecticut377303242216%34404328845%*
Delaware10862100678%112631011711%
District of Columbia737868817%7116636912%
Florida24076521815910%26469221928221%
Georgia1024648860116%1120588942925%
Hawaii11990119181%12825123524%
Idaho16340151318%182981519620%
Illinois12744010867017%12057010811812%
Indiana782936922713%790566894315%
Iowa354183100414%33763315427%
Kansas307732689514%309602747213%
Kentucky55145506789%600465006620%
Louisiana563204729619%570854801419%
Maine15504149903%170441543010%
Maryland590485274712%57353531228%
Massachusetts683906097912%63725622382%
Michigan1145109895416%11536410001815%
Minnesota517324610412%51101470169%
Mississippi388253224820%403033246024%
Missouri755146683313%762256797212%
Montana119031053313%127711045822%
Nebraska195471721514%19034178766%
Nevada310062819210%339582746224%
New Hampshire13435131152%13766133393%
New Jersey946217682423%83181782126%
New Mexico228421925419%242381961124%*
New York11827410163516%11580210308012%
New York City816605488949%631135556814%
North Carolina108916998539%11202610038212%*
North Dakota8793721422%74647566-1%
Ohio1422111300679%14699712944414%
Oklahoma458144077712%490834107619%
Oregon39947374127%447583738720%
Pennsylvania15462214039310%15565113854612%
Puerto Rico32056304825%32959305268%
Rhode Island120541043915%11566109266%
South Carolina596765151716%642155271122%*
South Dakota10052839820%9348848910%
Tennessee874187802112%951127901220%
Texas25091721220518%27140221496126%
United States3353789294306914%3454320295500417%
Utah220271997410%234142002317%
Vermont611658614%6617574115%
Virginia786807148810%844127276016%
Washington62558593235%683596003214%
West Virginia253232302810%277132362917%*
Wisconsin619405467213%60498555739%
Wyoming5497438625%5950492121%

Now one more analysis before we go!

Excess Mortality vs Official COVID deaths and Vaccination Rates

So on this blog, we’ve been talking strictly about excess mortality. I started using this metric because I found the discrepancies between state death definitions a bit annoying. Two weeks ago, I heard that Massachusetts was revising their official COVID death count downward by about 3,700. Massachusetts had long been one of the states that appeared to be overcounting COVID deaths, so I was not concerned about this change. While MA has been hanging out in the bottom 5 for excess mortality for months, in terms of official COVID deaths they had been top 10-15 for 2 years now. With this change our official count has dropped to #32, much more in line with the likely true count. I decided to do a quick correlation between states to see how excess mortality lined up with official COVID death counts. The correlation is a stunning r = .83 between reported COVID deaths and excess mortality. Massachusetts highlighted in yellow, suggesting even with the reduction we are still slightly over counting:

That outlier of undercounting is Vermont btw, not sure what they’re up to.

So then, since this question comes up a lot, I decided to do a correlation between vaccine uptake by state and excess mortality since 2/1/20. Even with no vaccines in 2020, we still see a moderately strong negative correlation r = -.65. In general something is called strong at r = .7 or .75:

Vaccine data source here.

Stay safe out there!

The Spanish Project – March 2022

/ bs king / 4 Comments

I haven’t posted about personal projects in a while, but I’ve updated a few people in my life about this recently and thought others might be interested as well. After finishing up my stats degree a few years ago, I realized I was almost certainly never going back to school again. That was fine for a while, and while I was dealing with some health issues some rest seemed to be exactly what I needed. However, a few months ago I started itching for a new intellectual project, and realized that I would love to become trilingual. Worldwide, speaking more than one language is the norm. I think it’s actually a little unclear what the percentages are, but the estimates seem to cluster around 40-50% of people worldwide speak 2 languages, and 15-20% more speak 3+. This leaves around 40% only speaking one language. In the US however, only about 20% of people can speak 2 (or more) languages, and this number represents a big increase from prior years. Now some of this could be the lack of regional language variation in the US (you can drive for 3000 miles without hitting a new language), but still, I thought it would be fun to be able to converse in another language. So I decided to do some research.

Because this was just a self driven goal, I decided a few things:

  1. I was going to start with Spanish (4 years of high school learning, but I was never comfortable with it)
  2. I’d give myself 5 years to get conversationally fluent in each language
  3. I’d give myself 3 months to figure out what method I would use
  4. I was really okay if I just became bilingual, so making as much progress as I could in one language was cool too.

The internet has a plethora of information about language learning, so I had a lot to read. Some of the most helpful stuff I came across said I needed to define my goals/reasons to help figure out my approach, so that led me to a couple other rules:

  1. I wanted to be able to comfortably watch Spanish language movies without subtitles
  2. Speaking immediately wasn’t important to me, as I am not planning travel any time soon
  3. I wanted something I could do on my own schedule, and that would be interesting enough for me to see the project through.

This led me to Comprehensible Input, or the input hypothesis. This is a language learning theory (or group of theories) that essentially states that at first, listening is more important than speaking. It’s based on the work of Stephen Krashen, who noted that listening before speaking is how we all acquire our first language, and maybe we should try to mimic that when we acquire a second language. There’s a lot of ins and outs to the theory from a linguistic perspective, many of which are on his website. While this method is a little hard to use in a traditional classroom, it’s exploded in popularity among independent learners. In the age of the internet, getting your hands on media in your target language is easier than ever and more fun than sitting in a classroom. I decided to go for it using a website called Dreaming Spanish, which makes videos specifically designed for adult learners looking to use this method. They specialize in videos that are easier than “native” media, to help you get up to that level. Pablo (the owner) explains the method here, along with the estimated number of hours of viewing it will take you to get to each level. Being numbers driven, I really liked the idea of being able to track hours to monitor my progress, so I decided to go for it. Most of the beginner videos are free, and once you hit the intermediate level it was $7/month (now up to $8/month) to get access to most of the intermediate videos. Less than $100/year to learn a language was a heck of a lot cheaper than grad school, so I went with the subscription.

Pablo estimates that you will need 1000 hours of input to be conversational in Spanish (based on being an English speaker), and 1500 hours to be essentially fluent. I decided to set a goal of 20 hours/month, which would put me at conversational in a little over 4 years and fully fluent in a little over 6 years. I decided to start September 1st, 2021, though I had already watched 40 hours during my investigation period. Here’s how I’m doing so far:

So far I have met or exceeded my goal every month. I started out 42 hours ahead of schedule, and now I am 64 hours ahead of where I thought I’d be. My new goal is to get to Level 4 by the one year mark, which I will meet if I continue to hit 20 hours/month.

More important than just the numbers however, I would say my progress is tracking with Pablo’s estimates. At level 3 (my current level) he estimates I should be able to understand topics adapted for learners, which I can. By level 4 (300 hours) I should be able to understand patient native speakers. At Level 5 (600 hours) I should be able to understand full speed native speakers, and a lot of media will be easier to use for learning.

Also important, the amount of time I spend on this has actually gone up in the last 6 months, which proves this method is engaging, at least for me! Here are my hours/month since I started, not counting the hours I put in before I decided to go with this method:

Interestingly, the jump in hours approximately correlates with hitting the first intermediate level, where I could watch faster videos with fewer drawings/hints for words. I did notice I was more excited to watch the more I felt myself improving in comprehension, which explains why February (one of the shortest months) was my highest number of hours to date.

I won’t pretend I understand all the linguistic debates over whether or not this method is truly superior, but I do have to think that having students get excited over their learning method is a key marker of success. I will never learn Spanish the way I want if I give up after a year, so any method that gets more exciting over time is a plus.

I’ll be updating periodically on my progress.

Adios!

State Level Excess Mortality – Feb 2nd, 2022

/ bs king

Well hello again! It’s time for another update to state level excess mortality. The last data update contained a dubious distinction, as for the first time our excess mortality since 2/1/20 surpassed 1 million people: 1,006,393. I recall at the very early in the pandemic that someone sent around an email pointing out that in the Hong Kong Flu epidemic of 1968 killed 100,000 people and nothing was canceled. At the time I responded that the 100k death count came over the course of 3 separate calendar years, and that we would have to check back in after 2 years to be equivalent. I feel pretty good about that email now, though I’m not happy I was correct.

Anyway, with the Omicron surge we’ve had some updates to mortality, so let’s get on with it!

Excess Mortality Above Average

Alright, first, here’s the map. When I last posted this 5 weeks ago, the range was about 872-4962 excess deaths/million residents. Now it’s 881-5245. Last time there were some adjustments in the way the data was counted, but this time data calculation methods have stayed steady:

Not a lot of changes in the hotspots, as we can see in the table with numbers:

StateExcess Deaths Above Average/Million,
2/1/20-2/2/22		Change from 12/29/21Change in Rank
Mississippi5245+284No change
Arizona4620+382No change
Alabama4305+105No change
New Mexico4187+459+3
Arkansas3973+210No change
Louisiana3970+64-2
Tennessee3946+214-1
Montana3879+263No change
Wyoming3821+211No change
West Virginia3629+216No change

Interesting that many of the already bad states did not appear to get off the hook in the current wave. Mississippi for example added the 16th most deaths in the last few weeks.

I continue to be pleased that Massachusetts is 47th (out of 52) and New Hampshire is 51st.

The states that added the most deaths in the last 5 weeks are:

State2/2/22 Total12/29/21 TotalDifferenceFeb rankDec Rank
New York355429026521322
Ohio332228334902023
New Mexico4187372845947
Indiana326128254362224
Michigan356731833841217
Arizona4620423838222
Rhode Island259322233713440
Maine221618563604245
Kansas292825873412730
Illinois284225003413031

New York moving up again, interesting.

Percent Excess Mortality, all states 2020 and 2021

I had mentioned last post that I was going to update the totals for all states excess mortality on a regular basis now as well. Some states are still adding to their totals from 2021, so these will continue to change. West Virginia for example appears to have only done 1 week of reporting since Thanksgiving. North Dakota appears they’re backlogged after Halloween. Not sure what’s going on with that, but I highlighted the states with the top 10 totals in green (2021 had a 4 way tie for 10th, so there are 13 states there), and asterisked any state that changed by more than 2 percentage points since the last update. All revisions were upward:

State2020 deaths – actual2020 deaths – expectedPercent Increase 20202021 deaths – reported2021 deaths – expectedPercent Increase 2021
Alabama625505460515%670295484022%
Alaska4971443512%5824461226%*
Arizona759556406219%824596381729%
Arkansas374323323413%398983335220%
California31543028117912%33520027495122%
Colorado471614122714%487374133518%
Connecticut377303227217%33894328013%
Delaware10862100678%11214996513%
District of Columbia737867769%7033629112%*
Florida24076521729911%26456821841321%
Georgia1024648901815%1108508925424%
Hawaii11990118891%12798123104%
Idaho16340150838%182841512021%
Illinois12744010847117%12059310769512%
Indiana782936892814%787386870515%
Iowa354183093914%33659314927%
Kansas307732693414%309432744913%
Kentucky55145504229%593545000219%*
Louisiana563204716219%561464778218%*
Maine15504149724%170531540411%
Maryland590485263512%57115528208%
Massachusetts683906100912%63705617763%
Michigan1145109910616%1151929985915%
Minnesota517324609712%50850469478%
Mississippi388253213621%401623250624%
Missouri755146685313%756466749212%
Montana119031044214%127471052821%
Nebraska195471727813%18970177647%
Nevada310062794611%338732751023%
New Hampshire13435130923%13766132014%
New Jersey946217681123%83091775947%
New Mexico228421925319%238581961622%
New York11827410167416%11578610274913%
New York City816605496649%631535535714%
North Carolina1089169942010%1004121003120%*
North Dakota8793718522%74697609-2%
Ohio14221112957610%14657812851614%
Oklahoma458144072612%487364089419%
Oregon39947372387%445613759619%
Pennsylvania15462213972311%15511613781813%
Puerto Rico32056301186%32780303308%
Rhode Island120541046815%10889108940%*
South Carolina596765185015%594315250913%
South Dakota10052834920%931985409%*
Tennessee874187795112%948617885720%
Texas25091721189818%27044821457226%
United States3353789293941814%3427210294848616%
Utah220271993610%233272004816%*
Vermont611658485%6617570616%
Virginia786807127810%843537259616%
Washington62558592256%682196004514%
West Virginia253232303010%24911235676%*
Wisconsin619405471513%60442555079%
Wyoming5497448423%5948490921%

An interesting note that in 2020 it took 18% excess mortality to be top 10, and in 2021 it took 21% or more. The US total went from 14% excess to 16% in those years. As more data comes in it will be interesting to see if that moves even further up.

Alright, that’s it for now! Hopefully things will only calm down from here.

All State Excess Mortality 2020 and 2021 – Reported as of January 19th, 2022

/ bs king / 2 Comments

I got a request from Henry to post all 50 states excess mortality numbers, both raw and percent above baseline for 2020 and 2021. This seemed a reasonable request, so I pulled it together. To note, data from the end of 2021 is still being compiled by some states. There were 7 that had notes that their data from the end of the year is likely still quite incomplete: Alaska, DC, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia. At least 2 of those states are currently showing a death drop, so that’s likely where that’s coming from.

The percent increase calculation changed slightly from my last post, so some of the numbers are slightly different – between 0-2% for 48 out of 54 districts, 3 or 4% for the other 6. Additionally, I used predicted deaths to try to compare in the last post, but here the 2021 numbers are actual reported. This means these numbers will only go up in subsequent weeks. I will probably redo this data in another month or two to see how the slow reporting states (and everyone else) changed.

With that out of the way, here’s the table. I bolded the data for the whole US, and highlighted any percent increase that was top 10 for the year. For 2021 it ended up being top 11 actually, as there was a 3 way tie for 9th. Data set was downloaded here this morning, and leave me any questions in the comments!

State2020 deaths – actual2020 deaths – expectedPercent Increase 20202021 deaths – reported2021 deaths – expectedPercent Increase 2021
Alabama625505455915%666665482222%
Alaska4971443412%5612461722%
Arizona759556398819%821746381729%
Arkansas374323318113%398343335519%
California31543028075912%33335627499521%
Colorado471614118914%485494135117%
Connecticut377303224817%33513327842%
Delaware10862100648%11160994312%
District of Columbia737867529%665161598%
Florida24076521828710%26413721836521%
Georgia1024648893015%1097448924423%
Hawaii11990118821%12737123093%
Idaho16340150678%182371510921%
Illinois12744010839418%12034510766312%
Indiana782936881914%778526869413%
Iowa354183092215%33445314996%
Kansas307732692414%308862744713%
Kentucky551455035110%581765001316%
Louisiana563204711220%550694776915%
Maine15504149654%170271540511%
Maryland590485259112%56328527837%
Massachusetts683906099312%63548617043%
Michigan1145109906316%1146119986515%
Minnesota517324607712%50556469458%
Mississippi388253210821%400493250923%
Missouri755146680013%751406745611%
Montana119031043514%126791053720%
Nebraska195471727913%18801177556%
Nevada310062788711%337122751823%
New Hampshire13435130923%13756131794%
New Jersey946217677123%82949775177%
New Mexico228421925419%235591960920%
New York11827410163016%11564010271013%
New York City816605495549%631235533214%
North Carolina1089169930310%96231100320-4%
North Dakota8793717922%74697623-2%
Ohio14221112942610%14518912840913%
Oklahoma458144069013%483104089418%
Oregon39947372057%442193762318%
Pennsylvania15462213953511%15435013774512%
Puerto Rico32056300617%32588303068%
Rhode Island120541047415%1062410888-2%
South Carolina596765180515%586125248412%
South Dakota10052834820%911685447%
Tennessee874187786112%944787887520%
Texas25091721171419%26894021457325%
United States3353789293687814%3403931294807715%
Utah220271992411%227862005014%
Vermont611658415%6609570116%
Virginia786807121110%839727261016%
Washington62558591946%678556005613%
West Virginia253232302610%24240235663%
Wisconsin619405468513%60312554999%
Wyoming5497449022%5923490221%

State Level Excess Mortality – December 29th, 2021

/ bs king / 12 Comments

Well hello and happy new year! I hope everyone has had a delightful holiday season and is doing well. As promised, I am back with a state level excess mortality update. Now, I didn’t get to this for a few weeks due to some aforementioned personal life things, and while I was gone I discovered the CDC had update the way they calculated excess mortality and was releasing slightly different numbers from the ones I was previously looking at. You can read their full explanation here, but here’s the gist:

Excess mortality is calculated by taking the prior 4 years worth of deaths and averaging them together to get a baseline of how many people you’d expect to die in a state in any given week. When the pandemic started, the CDC stopped including new deaths in their baseline, because of course we’re all hoping this current mortality level doesn’t become the baseline. Now that the pandemic has gone on for nearly 2 years however, this meant that they were only using 2 years worth of data to determine the “expected” number of deaths. So they decided to go back 6 years (while still excluding our 2 pandemic years, so basically 4 years of data) to get a better baseline. This changed everyone’s excess counts a bit because the baseline was now a bit different. They note that on average this slightly lowered excess mortality estimates by about 2%. In this post I’m going to take a look at if the new calculations substantially changed anything we were seeing before.

To note: they are now only releasing “deaths above average” so that’s what I’m posting here, rather than both deaths above 2SD and above average like I was before. Additionally, this death count is probably going to go up quite a bit in the next 4 weeks as it includes deaths that were reported during Christmas week, which tend to be artificially low.

Excess Mortality Above Average

Alright, first, here’s the map. When I last posted this 6 weeks ago, the range was about 953-4784 excess deaths/million residents. Now it’s 872-4962. So some states clearly lost and some gained:

The hotspots appears approximately the same, with some states changing a bit.

Here are the top 10, along with their change from the mid-November data:

StateExcess Deaths Above Average/Million, 2/1/20-12/27/21Change from 11/10/21 Change in Rank
Mississippi4962+178No change
Arizona4238+392+4
Alabama4200-125-1
Louisiana3906-181-1
Arkansas3763-323-1
Tennessee3733-70+1
New Mexico3728+432+9
Montana3616+178+5
Wyoming3609+1265+27
West Virginia3412+556+16

I looked at Wyoming and West Virginia in particular to see if the change in rank was due to the recalculation or reported deaths, and both states have been running at 50-75% excess mortality since September. With reporting delays, those are likely real increases.

I also looked at the top 10 states that increased their excess mortality count. The ones that showed big increases but didn’t make the top 10 overall were: Alaska (+864, 35th place), Vermont (+362, 25th place), Maine (+331, 45th place), Wisconsin (+314, 41st place), Michigan (+274, 17th place), and Minnesota (+231, 48th place).

I was quite thrilled to see Massachusetts is now 49th in the nation, though the CDC list includes Puerto Rico and DC, so that’s out of 52. New Hampshire is 51st.

Percent Excess Mortality, 2020 vs 2021

A new metric included in the data is the percent excess for each state by week. I thought this was interesting, because some states had a very different 2020 vs 2021. The average percent excess mortality for all states in from 2/1/20 to 12/31/2020 was 16.4%, the average so far for 2021 is 15.6%. Here are the top states in 2020, and how they fared in 2021:

State/Territory% Excess 2/1/2020 to 12/31/2020% Excess 2021 (reported so far)Difference
New York City53.614.6-38.9
New Jersey27.38.2-19.2
Mississippi24.923.8-1.1
North Dakota24.68.2-16.4
South Dakota24.19.2-14.9
Wyoming23.323.0-0.3
Arizona22.228.1+5.9
Texas22.026.2+4.2
Louisiana22.018.9-3.0
New Mexico21.621.5-0.1

Now here’s the reverse: top % excess in 2021, vs how they did in 2020.

State/TerritoryAverage % Excess 2/1/2020 to 12/31/2020Average % Excess 2021 (reported so far)Difference
Arizona22.228.1+5.9
Texas22.026.2+4.2
Alaska14.025.9+11.9
Georgia18.224.9+6.7
Mississippi24.923.8-1.1
Nevada14.823+8.2
Alabama17.823+5.2
Wyoming23.323-0.3
Vermont11.022.4+11.5
Idaho12.322.3+9.9

Unsurprisingly, having 2 bad years appears to land you on the overall top 10 list pretty quickly. I’ll be updating this again to see what 2021 comes in at when we have more reported. With the holidays and the pre-existing reporting delays, this should be relatively straightforward to get.

As always, let me know if there are any questions! Stay safe out there.

Actuarial Tables

/ bs king / 1 Comment

So my regular mortality data posting is going to be delayed, as unfortunately we’ve had two pretty close to home deaths within 10 days of each other. Neither were COVID related, but some deaths just make you feel like a light has gone out in the world. Both of these deaths were of that sort, and it’s going to be a dimmer Christmas without them.

Having lost two family members back to back, I’ve gotten the question a few times “was this expected?”. For one it certainly was, for the other not as much. But given that my stress response is often to look at numbers, I did get curious what the probability we were working with was at baseline.

I had posted the Social Security Administrations Actuarial table in one of my posts, so I turned there first. This pleasant little table is broken down by male/female and for each year of life gives you the chance you’ll die in the next year, the number of people (out of 100k) in your age cohort who are still alive, and the number of years you likely have left. All the data is for 2019, so COVID is not included here.

Graphing the probability of death in the next year, it looks like this:

Men get to a 1% annual mortality rate at age 59, women at 66. That goes to 5% by age 79 and 82, respectively. For 10% it’s 86 and 88.

Those seem like decent odds, especially since it’s not random. It is very likely that some chunk of the people in your age category who will die before their next birthday already know, or at least have some serious hints. Terminal cancer diagnoses, major medical events, etc, tend to give a little warning.

Do you want to get even more morbid while we learn about the power of compounding percentages? Good! Here’s the graph of how the death patterns will likely go for 100k people born the same year as you:

So if you are a man born in a particular year, you won’t lose your first 10k cohort members until you’re about 55. In the next decade by age 65, you’ll lose another 10k. The next 10k only take until 72, then 77, 81, 84, 87, 90, and at 94 there will be less than 10k left. For women those numbers are….why don’t I just put this in a table:

# of birth year cohort remaining (of each 100k)Male – ageFemale – age
90k5563
80k6573
70k7278
60k7782
50k8185
40k8488
30k8791
20k9093
<10k9496

It’s interesting that the male/female difference appears to come primarily from young age deaths – things actually even out quite a bit as they get older.

I apologize I don’t have a happier/more interesting post. If it helps, you can read about the practice of meditating on your death to help you focus on what’s important: Memento Mori.

I’ll get back on my regular schedule some time in the new year. Stay safe everyone.

Giving Tuesday – RIP Medical Debt

/ bs king / 1 Comment

I’ve been talking a lot about excess mortality lately, so I wanted to post about something that’s much harder to quantify: the number of people being left with excess medical debt. While we know that nearly a million excess deaths have occurred in the past 2 years, what we don’t know is how many people required intensive/expensive medical care but didn’t end up dying.

Assuming that number is likely to be up as well, I’d like to point people to a great charity called RIP Medical Debt. They buy medical debt in bulk and pay it off for people, meaning your gift can go 10x as far as it usually would. They have a gift matching special going on today, and if this last 2 years has been good to you, please consider throwing something in. You never know who it could make a difference for.

Read more about them here.

Overdose Deaths in the USA and Portugal

/ bs king

I’d like to take a break from posting on all cause mortality in the US and its relationship to COVID deaths to post about a different subset of deaths. Drug overdose deaths are unequivocally on the rise this year, going from about 78,056 between May 2019 and April 2020 to 100,306 in between May 2020 to April 2021. Since I am obsessed with state level data, here’s the CDC breakdown of where the jumps occurred:

This was of interest to me because (as I have posted previously) my brother has an unfortunate amount of experience with opioid addiction, and has written a book about it. With the opioid crisis in the US continuing to worsen, it’s no surprise he’s started trying to look at other countries to see how they have addressed things and if anything they’ve done has made a difference.

Enter Portugal.

If you read anything about our handling of drugs, particularly any of the cases around drug legalization, Portugal is bound to get cited. The basic narrative goes something like this: in 2001 Portugal decriminalized the consumption of all drugs. Most critics thought this would lead to worsening drug abuse/deaths, but instead drug related deaths fells, incarceration rates fell, and drug use was not impacted. Here’s an advocacy organization making this case. Here’s Time Magazine making this case. Here’s the Cato Institute making this case. Here’s the Obama White House complaining about everyone who’s making this case.

When I first heard about Portugal, I’ll admit I took this all at face value. After all, even the White House resorted to kind of nitpicking the statistics. But a few weeks ago I stumbled on to this Twitter thread from Lyman Stone that left me with more questions than answers. He started by pointing to the Global Health Data Exchange, where you can pull all sorts of mortality data for all sorts of countries. First, here’s Portugal’s deaths from drug use disorders:

Not bad. Looking at the source data, nothing for 2000 is available, so we skip from 1999 to 2001 and we do see a drop between those two years. So far so good. However, Lyman pointed out that drug use disorder deaths are one of two types of deaths filed under “substance use disorder deaths”. The other is alcohol related deaths. Here they are plotted together:
So….the same year the drug related deaths started to drop, alcohol deaths went up by an approximately equal amount. So what happened here? Did people start taking alcohol less seriously when drugs were legalized, or did some deaths that previously would have been called drug deaths get filed as alcohol deaths? Or is it all a coincidence? I actually don’t know. I couldn’t find anyone addressing this. It does appear Portugal has a legitimately alarming rate of alcohol consumption, so any explanation appears somewhat plausible. What we do know is that other countries nearby did not see the same increase in alcohol related deaths, even as they saw their drug deaths decrease:
If you lump them all together, we see that Spain has seen a decrease (though is higher) and Portugal has been steadily increasing since 1990. If you use the DALY’s (those account for age), things look even worse for Portugal:
I went to Wikipedia to see if I could get any general insight on the topic, and the opening paragraph caught my eye. Per Wiki, the purpose of the policy change in 2001 was actually to focus on HIV deaths. There isn’t a solid citation for this so I’m not sure if this is true, but I will note other articles tend to say this was “part of a broader health initiative” so it seems plausible. If it is true, then it’s actually pretty confusing what happened next:
Throwing in a few comparison countries (including the US), we note that every other country had a precipitous drop in HIV deaths in the late 90s. Portugal has had a much slower decline. Note the order of magnitude as well: right now Portugal appears to have over twice as many people dying of HIV as they do of substance use. I have no idea what happened here, but we did not see this in Spain or Italy.

Wiki did add to the drug overdose death mystery as well, noting that in this 2010 paper it stated that “the subsequent increase has been attributed by local informants to a shift in measurement practices, namely an increase in the number of toxicological autopsies performed (from 1,166 in 2002 to 2,805 in 2008), which increased the probability that people would be found to have drugs in their bodies at death.” To note: I have no idea if Portugal is now testing more people than most countries or fewer. This is why international comparisons are hard.

The same paper actually clarifies a different question that I had. Lyman Stone brought up the fact that despite decriminalizing everything in 2001, in 2008 the laws were amended to recriminalize large amounts of drugs. Not being very familiar with drugs/amounts, I wasn’t clear how much a “large amount” was. It turns out it’s a “10 day supply” which is apparently defined as “0.1 g heroin, 0.1 g ecstasy, 0.1 g amphetamines, 0.2 g cocaine or 2.5 g cannabis”. Now obviously there is not a super standardized measurement for heroin, but based on a bunch of Googling (that may have permanently flagged my account somewhere) I found that in Ithaca, New York one gram of heroin is typically divided in to 20 bags. A bag is $20, or a bundles for $180. So two bags of heroin would land you back in criminal territory.

This clarifies why the incarceration/conviction rate went up, as I assume 2 bags may not be a super unusual occurrence.

So basically, here are the questions I’m left with: why did Portugal experience such a spike in alcohol deaths right after they decriminalized the consumption of drugs? Why haven’t their HIV deaths come down like most other countries? Did the recriminalization really only catch dealers, or were a lot of regular users caught up in this as well? If anyone knows any good sources on any of this, I would appreciate hearing from you!

State Level Excess Mortality Updates – November 10th, 2021

/ bs king / 40 Comments

Well hello there! Another month has flown right by, and it’s time for another US excess mortality update. I’ve actually spent my week arguing about Portugal’s death counts (substance use related, not COVID related), but that’s a story for another post.

It’s been quite the month, and I was interested to look back and realize that when I first started doing these posts in August, the estimates for excess mortality put us at between 595,688 and 758,749 excess deaths since 2/1/2020. As of the most recent data release earlier this week, the US is now somewhere between 791,202 and 962,125. The 1 million mark is getting pretty close. If you have questions about these numbers, see prior posts.

Excess Mortality in 20-50 year olds

After my last post, bluecat57 left me a few comments about the concerns about excess mortality specifically in the younger adult age ranges. These are concerning deaths because 1. They are on the rise and 2. There is debate where they are coming from. It will be a while until all the data is in, but here’s the US trend for deaths through the end of September:

So basically during the pandemic we gained about 600ish extra deaths in the 25-44 year old age range, with a sudden jump in July of this year that took us to about 1800 extra deaths every week over baseline.

One of the links went to a clip of someone speculating on the reasons for these deaths, with several possible explanations. One explanation is that this is COVID. One is that something else is killing young people. One was that the vaccines were killing younger adults. Now this was an interesting claim, as the timeframe doesn’t entirely match up. July was on the later side for most people getting vaccinated, but perhaps the claim is there’s a delay. I decided to take a look at my 3 states I go back to: Massachusetts, Arizona and Tennessee. These are interesting states because they are in 3 totally different areas of the country, and have very different vaccination rates. In Arizona, 53.7% of the population is fully vaccinated. In Massachusetts, 70.3% and in Tennessee it’s 48.8%. That’s of the total population (kids excluded until recently) so we can assume that translates in to a somewhat higher number for this slice of the population. So how are these states doing? Here you go:

Starting around May of 2020, Arizona and Tennessee show gains here, whereas Massachusetts does not. Per the state report, around 80% of 25-44 year olds in Massachusetts are vaccinated, and we do not see much of a gain (if any) in young person deaths. As someone in that age group, it is of course relieving to see that my risk of death is basically unchanged since 2019. In Arizona and Tennessee, there are points where your risk of death was 1.5-2x as likely.

It seems unlikely the vaccines are causing these deaths, when we see bigger spikes in more unvaccinated populations than in largely vaccinated ones. I wanted to compare these to the overall deaths in each state, so here is that:

Interesting that each spike in overall mortality correlates to a similar spike in 25-44 deaths except the initial Massachusetts spike. This backs up the theory that the very first COVID spike hit nursing homes hard, and that has not been as much of a problem since then. I was also interested to note that despite COVID appearing fairly seasonal, death rates for Arizona and Tennessee exceed those of Massachusetts last winter.

So basically, I think it’s unlikely that vaccines are playing a role. I would speculate many of these are COVID deaths, or something else potentially related to COVID. As far as I’m aware, Massachusetts had the toughest lockdowns/restrictions of the 3 states (though lockdowns have been done in MA for over a year, unless you count mask mandates as lockdowns) so I’d suspect it’s not lockdown related either. Let me know if you have evidence Tennessee or Arizona were tougher though, as I obviously know my own state better than those two.

Excess Mortality Over Average Updates

Okay, so here’s the visual:

Who moved the most this month? Not a lot of major changes

StateExcess Deaths Above Average/Million 2/1/20-11/10/21 (change from 10/6)Change from 10/6 rank
Mississippi4784 (+160)No change
Alabama4325 (+325)No change
Louisiana4086 (+286)No change
Arkansas4086 (+303)No change
DC3946 (+201)No change
Arizona3846 (+251)No change
Tennessee3803 (+422)+1
Florida3655 (+290)+1
South Carolina3588 (+135)-2
Nevada3480(+324)+1

Of note, New York fell off the top ten list entirely, and currently sites at #17. It’s good to see the top states slowing down though, it’s been a tough go of it.

Most of the states with the biggest gains this month actually did not make the top 10. The top 5 gainers were Idaho (#32, +596), Puerto Rico (#31, +563), Montana (#13, +535), Kentucky (#12, +516) and Wyoming (#36, +500).

Excess Mortality Over Upper Bound by State

Graphical representation here:

Okay, here’s the top 10 list:

StateExcess Deaths/Million Over Upper Bound (change from 10/6)Change from 10/6 rank
Mississippi3362 (+60)No change
Alabama3280 (+276)No change
Florida2912 (+265)+1
Arizona2860 (+201)-1
Arkansas2829 (+236)+1
Louisiana2810 (+324)+1
Texas2793 (+244)+1
Tennessee2784 (+361)+3
New York2760 (+60)-4
Georgia2599 (+280)+2

Again, not a lot of motion except for NY running off the list. This seems fairly consistent with a falling peak: states simply aren’t adding huge numbers at the moment. The biggest changes are again (mostly) coming in states that have actually had lower pandemic numbers up until now: Idaho (#29, +521), Puerto Rico (#40, +496), Kentucky (#15, +457), Montana (#23, +396), Tennessee (#8, +361).

Again, given the nature of COVIDs seasonal interaction here, I’m going to continue to keep this updated for at least Dec/Jan/Feb. With acquired immunity and vaccines going on, it’s hard to know if we’ll see a substantial 4th (or 5th, depending how you count) wave of deaths in the US. Stay healthy everyone!

State Level Excess Mortality Updates – Oct 6th, 2021

/ bs king / 11 Comments

I can’t believe another month has gone by, but here we are! I am back to update state level excess mortality data from the CDC website, pulled on 06OCT21. See previous posts for more details about this data.

First up though, here’s an interesting gif someone made that shows the spread of COVID cases over time by region. Definitely shows some interesting seasonality, and also some interesting data anomalies.

Excess Mortality – How bad has it been?

As I’ve talked to a few people about state level data over the past few months, one of the things I’ve noticed is that some people’s perceptions of the pandemic do not match their individual state. I started wondering if this has anything to do with when the peak excess mortality is, and how long the states spend at high levels of excess mortality. Using the same CDC data I’ve been using, I decided to pull the number of weeks each state has a mortality rate >50% above their average. The data goes back to 2017, so we can see that this phenomena only happened three times between January of 2017 and March 28th, 2020: once to Puerto Rico in September 2017 (Hurricane Maria), and twice in Wyoming (October 2018 and January 2020). I’m not totally clear what happened those weeks.

So this happened 3 times in a little over 3 years. How often has it occurred since the end of March 2020? A total of 363 times in 45 states. The only 5 states that haven’t reached that level since the pandemic began are Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire and Oregon. The US as a whole spent 6 weeks in that range, with 25 states exceeding the national average. Here are those states, and how many weeks they spent at that level (so far):

State# of weeks at >50% excess mortality
Texas19
Mississippi17
DC16
Alabama, Arizona14
Nevada, North Dakota13
Oklahoma12
Georgia, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee10
Arkansas, California, Florida, 9
Indiana, New Mexico, New York City (city only)8
Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York (excluding city7

Just a note on NYC vs NY: only one of those weeks wasn’t overlapping. If we raise the bar and look at only states that have at least one week where they had DOUBLE the number of deaths they usually do, we find only 9 states have hit that bar:

State# of weeks at >100% excess mortality
New York City (city only)7
New Jersey, South Dakota5
California, Connecticut, Massachusetts3
Florida, New York (excluding city), North Dakota2
DC1

Another note on NYC vs NY: the 2 weeks for NY are also in the 7 week stretch for NYC. Not clear why the CDC reports these separately.

Excess Mortality Over Average Updates

First up, here’s the whole US. It’s worth noting that when I did this graph a month ago, the lowest value was 554 excess deaths/million. Now it’s 739 excess deaths/million. The brightest red a month ago was 4107/million, now it’s 4624/million. The greens and the reds mean more than before:

So who were the top movers this month? Let’s see:

StateExcess Deaths Above Average/Million 2/1/20-10/6/21 (change from 9/8)Change from 9/8 rank
Mississippi4624 (+516)No change
Alabama4000 (+559)+1
Louisiana3801 (+534)+3
Arkansas3404 (+379)No change
DC3749 (+97)-3
Arizona3597 (+251)-1
South Carolina3453 (+326)No change
Tennessee3381 (+326)+3
Florida3365 (+538)+3
New York3177 (+91)-2

Note: the NY data here is all of NY, state and city combined. Seems incredible that New York may actually fall out of the top 10 for excess mortality since the pandemic started. To note: there were 4 states that saw substantial gains but are not yet at top 10 level. These were: Georgia (+471, 14th place), Oklahoma (+442, 13th place), Peurto Rico (+407, 37th place) and Kentucky (+390, 17th place).

Excess Mortality Over Upper Bound by State

Okay, here are the states that most exceeded 2 standard deviations from the mean mortality:

And now the top 10:
StateExcess Deaths Over Upper Bound (change from 9/8)Change from 9/8 rank
Mississippi3302 (+443)No change
Alabama3004 (+502)+1
Arizona2659 (+210)+1
Florida2647 (+499)+5
New York2646 (+56)-3
Arkansas2582 (+324)No change
Louisiana2574 (+449)+3
Texas2549 (+345)-1
South Carolina2471 (+280)-1
New Jersey2452 (+52)-5

To note, there are again 4 states who had a top 10 gain in excess mortality, but didn’t make the overall top 10. These are: Tennessee (+483, 11th place), Georgia (+420, 12th place), Oklahoma (+380, 14th place), Kentucky (+327, 21st place).

As always, let me know if there are any questions and I’ll be back in a few weeks! Given seasonality, I’m going to try to keep this up monthly. I’d also ideally like to see if some states start to regress at all. There is a lot of commentary that COVID mostly killed people who were going to die anyway, but so far that is not what we are seeing. If that’s true, at some point some states excess mortality should start to decrease below the norm. So far I’m only seeing slight decreases for Connecticut, Rhode Island and Minnesota, but those are small and could be adjustments.