wpinvestigative / excess_deaths_covid19

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/investigations/coronavirus-excess-deaths-may/

[This data is published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license]

About this story

• U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19
• Pandemic’s overall death toll likely surpassed 100,000 weeks ago
• Heart conditions drove spike in deaths beyond those attributed to covid-19, analysis shows
• Pandemic isolation has killed thousands of Alzheimer’s patients while families watch from afar

Find the data for your state

• beautiful_table_wp_050220.xlsx
• states_weekly_table.csv
• states_summary_table.csv

Folders of interest within this repo

• data/archive - Archived data used in analysis and models
• data/outputs - beautiful_table_wp_050220.xlsx and other data generated by scripts and notebooks used in story

Notebooks

• National and state excess deaths analysis - Exploratory visualization of data generated by models
• 50ish states percent and lag - Analyzing lag and weekly excess deaths by state
• National and state covid deaths analysis by race - Analyzing weekly excess deaths by state by race
• Alzheimers and other causes: National - Analyzing weekly excess deaths by specific causes of death
• Alzheimers: National and state - Analyzing weekly excess deaths by specific causes of death by state

Scripts

• 00_package_prep.R - follow instructions to make sure correct packages are installed
• 01_xxx - 04_xxx - Run scripts in order to generate data used in analysis

Excess deaths

Higher-than-normal mortality is a starting point for scientists seeking to understand the full impact of the pandemic.

Deaths announced in the early part March and April, based on reports from state public health departments, failed to capture the full impact of the pandemic. Those incomplete numbers were widely cited at a time when many states were making critical decisions about closing businesses and taking other actions to stem the spread of the virus.

Excess deaths are not necessarily attributable directly to covid-19. They could include people who died because of the epidemic but not from the disease, such as those who were afraid to seek medical treatment for unrelated illnesses, as well as some number of deaths that are part of the ordinary variation in the death rate. The count is also affected by increases or decreases in other categories of deaths, such as suicides, homicides and motor vehicle accidents.

Methodology

This is a data and scripts used for the state-by-state analysis of excess deaths in each state. It's a reproduction of the methodology and tools laid out by a research team led by the Yale School of Public Health, which used historical data on all deaths between 2015 and early 2020, published by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), to model the number of deaths that would normally be expected each week from March 1 to May 9 in the U.S. and most states. The estimate takes into account seasonal variations, intensity of flu epidemics and year-to-year variations in mortality levels.

NCHS data are collected from state health departments, which vary significantly in how quickly they report deaths. The Yale analysis adjusts the baseline in each state to reflect those differences. In states that have been slow to report deaths to the NCHS, the baseline for expected deaths in recent periods is adjusted downward.

The number of overall deaths and covid-19 deaths are not modeled or estimated. They are observed deaths. These data were obtained from provisional death data published weekly by the NCHS, which are based on the state in which each person’s death occurred, not on the state of the person’s residence. For privacy reasons, the NCHS does not publicly report deaths from states that had fewer than 10 covid-19 fatalities in any given week. For those weeks in those states, the Yale-led analysis used data compiled by The Post from state health departments.

Figures for North Carolina and Connecticut were not up to date, and those states are not included in this analysis. Pennsylvania is reporting deaths after significant lag and actual death counts for 2020 are most likely underestimated, according to NCHS.