Deaths

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! ...

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we suspected and saw that nursing homes and other facilities where people are grouped together (prisons, …) could be at higher risk of transmission. The focus on nursing homes was because deaths seem to disproportionately affect the older population that also resides there. And nursing homes are also home for frail people with comorbidities. In its dashboard, the Maryland Department of Health quickly started to build a dedicated page with numbers from different “congregate facility settings”. As I did for other metrics from this dashboard, I made a chart of what seemed the cumulative total cases, differentiating staff (who are stuck working there) and residents (who stuck living in these facilities): ...

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 May 14, 2020, Maryland is carefully reopening from an easy lock-down caused by coronavirus spreading thru the community (and all over the world). In this post, I’ll go through all the variables we have on the MD Health Department dashboard. But first, the official data comes from the MD dashboard and if you want scientific information about COVID-19, please consult the CDC website. If you are interested, you can read my previous posts on COVID-19 in Maryland from this page. ...

In my previous post, I was wondering if Maryland was ready to reopen, ready to enter Stage 1 of COVID-19 recovery. I also mentioned, in the end, that if Gov. Hogan announced the reopening of Maryland, he also gave counties the power to “fully” open, to be partially open or even to remain closed. You can see more info about Maryland Strong: Roadmap to Recovery: there is a map of what Counties decided. ...

A visual analysis of Governor Larry Hogan’s decision to enter Stage 1 of reopening Maryland. (This will be a post based on a thread of tweets I posted on May 14 with updated graphs for today - one days after the start of Stage 1 - and more) Maryland is in state of emergency since March 5, 2020 due to COVID-19. Governor Larry Hogan announced on May 14 that Maryland will " gradually reopen with flexible community-based approach" ( the official declaration is here). The MD Strong plan said " a 14-day downward trajectory of benchmark metrics - or at least a plateauing of rates - is required before recovery steps can begin". This Phase 1 started yesterday, May 15, 2020. So, are we there already? ...