Death data shows virus toll compared with 2019

New mortality figures from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner Tuesday raised eyebrows among those of us who like to stare at data to glean what the numbers say about real people’s lives. And deaths.

The numbers appear to show that most people who have died of, or with, COVID-19 in this horrific spring were not about to die of something else. That may seem obvious but it’s not, considering that 60 percent of all the roughly 4,000 deaths have been among people age 80 and older, and another 21 percent of the deaths have hit people 70 to 79.

What we see in the preliminary figures is that 14,308 deaths were reported to the medical examiner in the first five months of 2020. That compares with 9,920 deaths in the same period in 2019 — for a difference of 4,388.

Obviously that’s not just the normal up-and-down pattern from year to year. As it happens, the added deaths — known in the trade as “excess mortality,” as if all deaths aren’t excess — line up with the reported coronavirus deaths.

And it lines up by month. In January and February, the differences between 2019 and 2020 were trivial, fewer than 45 deaths. (trivial unless you’re one of those 45, of course.)

Then in March the total shot up by 192 in 2020, as we had 126 reported deaths. In April, the total rose by 2,664, more than doubling the 2019 total of 1,938 reported deaths. In April, by no coincidence, we peaked at 2,464 COVID-19 deaths.

May saw a decline in COVID deaths, to 1,453, and sure enough, the overage from 2019 came in close to that, at 1,604.

I would have guessed the mortality rate would rise by less than the total of reported coronavirus deaths. Surely a lot of very old people who died with the disease were close to the end of their lives anyway, right? That’s especially true since COVID-19 as a cause of death may be accompanied by a “comorbidity” such as heart disease, emphysema or COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

So what’s happening with the numbers? The short answer is, it’s too soon to draw conclusions until we’ve had many more months to study.

“It will take time to analyze increases or decreases in mortality from other specific causes (such as suicidal injuries, accidental drug intoxications, heart attacks, etc.),” Dr. James Gill, the chief medical examiner, said in releasing the numbers Tuesday.

It’s possible, for example, that we’re seeing coronavirus speed up the deaths of people near the end of their lives. That would mean we’ll see the mortality rate decline after the crisis abates — or we will see the number of new COVID-19 deaths rise way higher than the number of additional deaths compared with prior years.

All of this matters because it tells public health officials, and the public, how the pandemic is really affecting us. For example, you may have noticed above that in March, April and May, the death rate compared with 2019 rose more than the reported COVID-19 deaths — by 417 people.

That’s not just random noise in the numbers. Why did those extra people die?

Josh Geballe, the state’s chief operating officer and a former tech executive who likes to look at data, wondered Tuesday whether some were COVID-19 deaths that were not reported. Entirely possible, as many people died without a test.

“But probably more likely, much of that has to do with people avoiding care, avoiding important medical procedures,” Geballe said.

He urged anyone needing hospital care to get it. “It’s safe there, and we need people to seek the care that they need,” Geballe said.

A couple of final asides here. First, it’s been a good week for data releases. My colleague Jordan Fenster and I detailed five key pieces of data that were missing from public view, in a story this past Sunday. On Monday, the state released one of those — hospital admissions and discharges.

That report showed that 22 percent of all state residents admitted to Connecticut hospitals and no longer being treated in those hospitals, died — and 78 percent were discharged.

The release on mortality rates in 2020 satisfies a second of our list of five. Maybe we’ll go 5 for 5 this week. This still is important but it’s worth remembering that reliable data doesn’t float up the Connecticut

River from the Long Island Sound. It takes a lot of careful effort to build.

For example, you may notice the COVID-19-related deaths added up to 4,043 in March, April and May, which is more than the number the state reported. That’s because these deaths include people from elsewhere who died here — and every one of them had to be researched for addresses, duplications, causes of death and on and on.

That’s why it’s all the more amazing that the state Department of Public Health in April, 1919, with just a tiny staff, compiled the excess deaths data for September through December 1918 — when Connecticut sustained 8,488 influenza deaths.

And they did it by age group, and by town. (That crisis hit young adults, not old people.) Their data secret 101 years ago: No health privacy laws. That’s a column for a different day.