Health
Excess mortality during the covid-19 pandemic: State-by-State data
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by ELISABETH GAWTHROP | Last updated Feb. 3, 2023
In September of last year, one of our weekly COVID-19 updates for MPR News included some analysis and visuals related to excess mortality during the pandemic. President Biden had just remarked that the pandemic phase of COVID-19 was over. We looked at a few methods for examining whether the data backed up his statement, such as looking at deaths coded as directly caused by COVID versus deaths coded with COVID as a contributing, but not primary, cause. But as we wrote then:
If one is skeptical about the coding of deaths as COVID-related, a more straightforward metric is simply the total number of deaths from all causes. If COVID deaths, even deaths where COVID is one of many contributing factors, are resulting in a higher-than-normal overall number of deaths, that is obviously still a problem.
Deaths have a seasonal pattern – more people tend to die in winter – but are fairly consistent year-to-year. So the total number of deaths in a given week or month can be compared to the number of deaths that would normally be expected in that time period. Any number above the expectation is called ‘excess deaths’. The CDC explains more about this here, which is also where we downloaded the data for this section.
We cannot assume that all excess deaths are directly COVID deaths, but many are likely at least indirectly related to the pandemic. Other causes could include failure to get adequate healthcare for other conditions due to pandemic issues or fear, or stress from the mental health toll of the pandemic.
Now that 2022 is over, we revisited the excess mortality data provided by the CDC and created some new graphics to allow you to examine the data for the U.S. as a whole as well as state-by-state.
The waves of COVID-19 experienced in the U.S. are evident from this graph: the initial surge, the winter of 2020-2021 before widespread vaccination, and then the delta and omicron waves. And while there hasn’t been a huge surge since the omicron wave early in 2022, excess deaths have still been persistently above the CDC’s upper bound of expected deaths (red line in graphic), which they describe as “a one-sided 95% prediction interval of these expected counts.”
In fact, there were 44 weeks in 2022 with the weekly death count exceeding the upper bound of expected deaths — that’s more than in 2021 (36 weeks) or 2020 (41 weeks). The weekly death count has exceeded the average expected number of deaths (orange line in graphic) for all but a handful of weeks since the pandemic began.
The CDC also publishes the same data by state.
As we’ve seen in our Color of Coronavirus analysis, it’s clear the virus has swept through different areas of the country at different times, with the timing sometimes even varying strongly between neighboring states. Take for example Massachusetts and Vermont. The deadliest period for Massachusetts was the first wave of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, while for most weeks in Vermont in 2020, weekly deaths were below the upper threshold of expected deaths. Vermont’s most deadly period has come in 2022. Other states (e.g. Minnesota) saw their worst stretch at the end of 2020, and still others (e.g. Florida) had their highest excess mortality in 2021.