STUMP » Articles » Mortality with Meep: Ranking the States by COVID age-adjusted death rates » 15 December 2022, 19:37

I’m still waiting for the CDC to finalize the 2021 mortality database. Looking at last year’s info, they finalized 2020’s data around December 22 as a Christmas gift, so while we wait, let me do a few other things.

(and yes, I’m working on a … New Year’s … gift for everybody. Depending on what the CDC does.)

(I may need a backup plan)

I have said I would return to COVID mortality issues, and this is me returning to them.

Yes, I have seen loads of correlative studies that purport to show that Republicans are more likely to die from COVID. Or that vaccines make you more likely to die from COVID. Yes, I see it all from all sides.

I think all the studies are mainly showing that old people die from COVID.

No, they’re not really “controlling” for age very well.

There is a lot of very loose reasoning (still) going about, and I’m going to do a few posts comparing the various states, because I’ve got my lovely tile grid map template, so let’s put it through its paces.

The COVID death rates so far

First off, all the COVID death rates I’ll be comparing will be on an age-adjusted basis. More on methodology at the end of the post.

For this section, let’s look at all the data on COVID deaths we have so far.

First, in tile grid map form:

And here is the ranking table of the top 10 states with the highest age-adjusted death rates over the entire period.

To be sure, calendar years are not the “natural” breakpoints for the COVID “cycle”, should there be one. It’s not quite clear there is a seasonal cycle (like with flu) yet.

I want to note something about the ranking table — it may exaggerate the rate spacing, whereas the tile grid map helps you see that there is a lot of bunching in the rates.

Picking the data for comparisons

But many may object — hey, that’s for the entire COVID period! We want to see if we can scapegoat somebody over vaccines (one way or another)!

So we need to throw out 2020:

And then there is 2021 — some people had access to vaccines during part of the year, and things changed, etc.

And I will point out — in all these tile grid maps, I’m using the same color scales. The 2020 and 2021 death rates are much higher than what we’ve seen in 2022.

2022 ranking results for COVID death rates

Here we go for COVID age-adjusted death rates by state in 2022 (so far):

And the top ten by death rate:

There may be some geographic patterns going on here, but it’s not clear to me.

A lot of the COVID mortality is almost like a liquid sloshing in a container, and it’s not like there’s anything near a steady state. Some of these rankings may change by the time I get the final data for 2022, but it’s only a few months’ worth of data, most likely.

Methodology

This data was updated as of December 4, 2022, capturing deaths through November 19, 2022.

For COVID deaths, I pulled the count where it was COVID (UCD-10 code U07.1) as their underlying cause of death (not contributing cause of death.)

I split out the deaths by state of residence, and I did grab the crude death rates and age-adjusted death rates. If you’re on the substack post, you can download the spreadsheet and look at the original data.

Citation: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. National Vital Statistics System, Provisional Mortality on CDC WONDER Online Database. Data are from the final Multiple Cause of Death Files, 2018-2020, and from provisional data for years 2021-2022, as compiled from data provided by the 57 vital statistics jurisdictions through the Vital Statistics Cooperative Program. Accessed at http://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd-icd10-provisional.html on Dec 15, 2022.