Death-Rate

After my previous posts about age of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Maryland, it was logical that I write about the gender of these cases and deaths. Rest assured: this time, it will be much shorter ;-) Indeed, in a nutshell, in Maryland (like in the rest of the world), women are more impacted than men by the disease. But men are dying of the disease a little bit more than women. Note: this post was updated on July 15, 2020, to fix an error in my code! ...

After my previous post on the age of COVID-19 cases in Maryland, it was logical that I write about the age of COVID-19 deaths in Maryland. So far, media and State Departments of Health all agreed that the older someone is, the more risk this person has to die from coronavirus. So far, this is unfortunately also true in Maryland. In the graph below, we clearly see that people 50-59 years old have more than 250 deaths, people 60-69 have more than 500 deaths, people 70-79 have more than 750 deaths and people 80+ have nearly … 1,5000 deaths! The graph at the bottom also clearly shows that people in age categories 60 and above provide most of the new daily deaths due to COVID-19 (even if we came back down from a peak at about 40 deaths in 80+ at the end of April). ...

The recent Black Live Matters protests made me think a lot - as a white man, as a husband and dad, as a biologist by training, as a health economist by day, as someone interested in COVID-19 data where I live by night … as a human, in summary. I don’t have grandiose pieces of advice or any deep thoughts, not for here (but if you call me, we can talk ;-)). Here, let’s continue our exploration of COVID-19 data in Maryland. ...

On its dashboard, the Maryland Department of Health is reporting confirmed deaths due to COVID-19 in two ways: by date of report and by date of death (updated as amendments to the death record are received). The definition of confirmed death is: A death is classified as confirmed if the person had a laboratory-confirmed positive COVID-19 test result. What I was intrigued is that reporting seems to follow a pattern influenced by the day of the week (see figure below). The top chart (cumulative) is just an addition. A plateau would be welcome: it would indicate death rate is slowing down. Today, the COVID-19 death rate is 41 / 100,000 population. The bottom chart shows the number of deaths due to COVID-19 reported each day: the black line represents the number of deaths each day they were reported; the grey line represents the number of deaths each day they occurred. ...

Since a few weeks, I report the raw number of COVID-19 deaths in Maryland counties. If this gives an idea of the cumulative number of deaths - which is interesting - it doesn’t reflect the fact that some counties have more inhabitants than others. That’s why I plotted below the number of COVID-19 deaths adjusted for the population (i.e. the COVID-19-specific death rate): Today (May 16, 2020), in terms of absolute number of deaths, Montgomery, Prince Georges and Baltimore County are the top 3 counties (this is the same for cases but not in the same order). In terms of confirmed deaths per 100,000 population, the top 3 counties are Kent, Prince Georges and Montgomery. ...