Oh hi friends! It’s been a minute since I posted here, but I’ve appreciated the various well wishes/comments people have continued to send me. A lot has gone on personally since last I posted but I’ve had a lot of random data related thoughts kicking around in my head recently, and I’ve gotten a few nice comments in the past couple weeks of people suggesting I should do a post about various topics. These include: the replication crisis as applied to true crime, UK and Canadian healthcare systems vs the US, medications for substance abuse cessation, and possibly something about eye conditions. Since I’m out of practice writing posts I figured a brief life update might help me get some of the rust out and motivate me further. So what have I been up to in the last three years? Well here’s a brief overview:

1. The potato diet I mentioned in the prior post didn’t work out. I get pretty bad migraines and about a week in I got one that last several days. It stopped when I changed my diet. Ah well.
2. We had a third major death in the family, after the two I mentioned in this post, the third in 14 months. I now have an unfortunate amount of experience with planning funerals and eldercare.
3. About 2 years ago, I started experiencing some eye problems in addition to my pre-existing migraines. It took about 8 months to sort out what was going on, but it turns out I had a previously unidentified genetic eye condition (epithelial basement membrane dystrophy) which had caused a condition called recurrent corneal erosions. I would suggest not reading that Wiki page if you’re squeamish, but suffice it to say the second sentence in the description calls it an “excruciatingly painful” disorder, and I can personally verify that is correct.
4. Because of #3 I’ve had 2 eye surgeries in the past year, and then my gallbladder decided to get in on the action and I had to get that removed. I’m pretty much ready to be done with surgeries, thank you very much. The one plus side is it appears my eyes may have been causing some large portion of my migraine problems, so things seem improved on that front. We’ll see if that holds, but so far I’m hoping the second half of 2025 is better than the first.

So that’s the news from Lake Wobegon! Let me know how you all are doing and any particular posts you’d like to see if I get some posting up and running again.

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:

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:

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.

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:

Stay safe out there!

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:

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:

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:

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.

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!

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:

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: