COVID mortality

[meep]

I have done a variety of investigations into COVID mortality

My most recent 4:

COVID Mortality with Meep: The John Hopkins Post That Was Yanked

Mortality with Meep: Comparing COVID-19 with Historical Mortality and Prior...

Mortality with Meep: Comparing COVID-19 and 2020 Total Death Rates Against...

Mortality with Meep: The Sex Gap in COVID and Total Mortality

[meep]

Yes, I like shades of blue.

[dr_t_non-fan]

This is pretty good stuff. 538-worthy (if you want to get noticed).

[meep]

Well, I wouldn’t mind if other people promoted it.

But I don’t have the time to flog this stuff all over the place. Also, most people don’t want to look at death stats.

[SpaceLobster]

Tweeted and posted on linkedin. Because distributing quality content like that makes my profile on the platform better :).

Also, mad props to the first use of the name Makeham I’ve seen outside of a textbook.

[Lucy]

Yeah, me neither, sorry. But those are nice graphs. Thanks for putting them together. I hope they get some traction.

[meep]

I forgot to filter on sex in my last post, so I fixed that, and have done another post with the sex breakout:

COVID Mortality with Meep: Update of Graph -- Plus Age and Sex Breakout by Week

[Alemana]

This is excellent and a pleasure to read! Regarding the Nov 7 entry:

Excess mortality for the 25-34 demographic (and to a lesser extent adjacent demographics) not explained by Covid could possibly be explained in part by the increase in crime, including homicides. It is also possible that suicides increased as well, but I don’t have that data for the US.

I am dismissing the standard “died from other medical causes due to not seeking care or an interruption in care” because I don’t see why that would disproportionately impact the 25-34 year olds.

[meep]

@Alemana

Excess mortality for the 25-34 demographic (and to a lesser extent adjacent demographics) not explained by Covid could possibly be explained in part by the increase in crime, including homicides. It is also possible that suicides increased as well, but I don’t have that data for the US.

I think it’s mainly drug overdoses and suicides. Yes, homicides are also up, but those other two usually are much bigger in magnitude.

hmmm, need to get the drug overdoses in there.

of course, heart disease and cancer are even higher (at older ages)

[meep]

I’ve got to do an update to my animated gif of excess mortality… upper midwest looks awful for fall

[meep]

Going to be tweet-talking mortality next Tuesday:

U.S. Mortality Reaching 3 Million Deaths | SOA

Join us for the SOA’s Twitter chat on Dec. 8 at 1 p.m. Eastern on mortality challenges and trends. This twitter chat on @SOActuaries will include SOA member Mary Pat Campbell, FSA, MAAA, Magali Barbieri from the Human Mortality Database, and R. Dale Hall, FSA, CERA, CFA, MAAA, SOA managing director of research. Join us Dec. 8. #SOATalksMortality

Mary Pat Campbell (meepbobeep)

[meep]

Got a new visualization…

[meep]

new post with more visualizations (including the above gif)

COVID Mortality with Meep: Making Comparisons, by Age, Week, and State

[NormalDan]

Cool post, thanks for all the interesting graphs

[meep]

Explaining the tile grid map:

Mortality with Meep - COVID mortality as a percentage of all U.S. deaths

[funkingded]

Need to post that gif on https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/

[SpaceLobster]

The number of deaths was amazing!

[meep]

I did.

r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] Animated GIF of COVID-19 Deaths as Percentage of Total...

Please upvote!

[meep]

I compiled the questions threads from yesterday’s #SOATalksMortality twitter convo.

U.S. Mortality Trends, Long-Term and 2020, and a Video Explainer

I was there for the COVID bit - the SOA & HMD folks talked the longer-term trends in U.S. mortality.

[meep]

Random Thoughts

An elderly mother of someone I know recently died of cancer. But because they tested positive for COVID (which had nothing to do with anything) the death certificate came back saying the reason for death was COVID. I wonder how much COVID death overreporting is going on.

Random Thoughts

Probably not as much as the overreporting of heart disease. That’s what they put on the death certificate if someone dies of natural causes, and they don’t bother to check what happened before filling out the certificate. I have two relatives whose death certificates say “heart attack” who died of something unrelated to the heart.

Random Thoughts

Best answer I have: some, but not enough to really matter. (agree with JSM) The obsessive in me would love to throw your acquaintance’s mother’s death out of the COVID pile. However, Like Dara mentions, CoD isn’t “exact” anyway. How many vehicle deaths are caused by a heart attack resulting in crash? Should they be accidental deaths or just heart disease? I think the key is excess mortality is the best starting place (agree with NormalDan). Seeing how that extra mortality lines up with oth…

and my own take:

Random Thoughts

Don’t make me drop “they can put up to 30 causes of death on the certificate” on y’all. [it averages to about 3 per cert., though] More to the point – there does seem to be very high attribution of COVID for old folks… but not for younger folks among their excess mortality. Here’s the graph that really made me go HMM: [image] If you want the background on how I put that together, you can go here:

Random Thoughts

Wow… That makes me go “hmmm”, too. I was flippant above. We are all data professionals here, and we all know that data is messy. One guy you know had cancer and also had covid-19, and he died. Probably they both contributed to his dying on that day. Data professionals ought to understand that “cause of death” isn’t a clean data element. It’s often more than one thing. (I’m surprised the average is as high as 3, but not that it’s well over 1.) I’m tired of people trotting out an anecdote about h…

Okay, I crammed enough into one post…