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 simpler section at the latest date for which death data by age is available (i.e. today, July 9th, 2020) also shows this curve highly skewed towards older age groups (at the bottom, compare that to cumulative cases, on top):

The two graphs below confirm that people in old age are at much higher risk of death due to COVID-19. On top, if we report the deaths in each age group by the population they actually are in Maryland, we also see that deaths in 80+ disproportionaly affect this age group, reaching a COVID-19-specific mortality rate of 629 per 100,000 pop.!!! The table under the graph gives all the data points.

And when we look at it to see the relative importance of each age groups compared to the total number of cases, we see again that people aged 80+ have 46% of all deaths, followed by people 70-79 (25%) and people 60-69 (16%).

Age group (years old)	COVID-19-specific mortality rate (per 100,000 pop.)
0-9	0
10-19	0.1
20-29	2.2
30-39	4.9
40-49	13.1
50-59	28.8
60-69	70.8
70-79	180.1
80+	629.8

As opposed to cases by age, we don’t see here any shift in most affected age group: the older some is, the more risk of dying from COVID-19 exists (and part of the problem is the close living conditions in nursing homes). There aren’t 1,000 solutions to protect them: wear a mask and practice physical distancing, especially when there is a risk to meet elderly people and transmit the disease to them!

To be continued …

As usual, you’ll find other graphs on my page about COVID-19 in Maryland (and figures above are updated with new data as they appear) and the data, code and figures are on Github (including these ones).