Some Quick and Dirty Coronavirus Analysis

We're obsessed with fatality rates. So what about them? One of my regular blog writers has done a quick and dirty analysis comparing fatality rates by state to numbers of LTC facility residents.

His supposition is that the elderly in nursing homes are the most vulnerable and most likely to die from coronavirus, and that if you take into account the numbers of residents in such facilities from state to state you can begin to get a clearer picture of which states performed better or worse in terms of fatality rates.

For example, even though Florida has lots of elderly people, their fatality rate is fairly low as compared to many other states, but Florida's snowbirds are mostly vigorous, independent elderly who are healthy for their age. Healthy enough to live active lives on their own. The average LTC resident is rapidly entering their final years/months and are weakened enough that just about anything will carry them off.

Here are the deaths per nursing home residents for the Upper Midwestern states:

Minnesota: 0.254
Wisconsin: 0.278
Iowa: 0.193
North Dakota: 0.260
South Dakota: 0.292

Iowa, in particular, goes from being a worse-than-average state in per capita deaths to an above-average state in deaths per nursing home resident. Otherwise, however, the numbers are more or less interchangeable.

Florida is an interesting case. It has a lot of old people, the second highest rate in the country. But its per capita nursing home population is not commensurately large. Here are the numbers for Florida and some other states, more or less randomly selected:

Florida: 0.337
New York: 0.452
Illinois: 0.305
Utah: 0.266
Washington: 0.259

Utah and Washington are also interesting cases. They both look like great performers when deaths per capita are measured, but they have relatively few nursing home residents. On these numbers, their performance is closer to average.

Anyhow, the writer of the post concludes that his surface analysis is far from conclusive, but does seem show some interesting trends.

a reply to: ketsuko

I'll be interested to see the CDC numbers for total deaths from all causes over the year 2020, and compare it to other years. We have so much conflicting data, something like that will tell the truth as to just how deadly this virus was in the US.

a reply to: network dude

Well here's the 2018 stats.

www.cdc.gov...

Number of deaths for leading causes of death:

Heart disease: 655,381

Cancer: 599,274

Accidents (unintentional injuries): 167,127

Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 159,486

Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 147,810

Alzheimer’s disease: 122,019

Diabetes: 84,946

Influenza and Pneumonia: 59,120

Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis: 51,386

Intentional self-harm (suicide): 48,344

This gives a useless table that combines deaths by covid, the flu and pneumonia from 2019-2020.

www.cdc.gov...

This tool is harder to wrap your head around as the y axis is in deaths per 100,000 instead of a concrete number but

www.cdc.gov...#

From what I can tell, heart disease and cancer still beat the rona by a long shot.

a reply to: ketsuko

I'm going with a personal chart....

Is a reason why, I do not worry about covid, while I am very upset about the whole pandemic crap I am not so much about been infected, we are inundated with covid, infections, infections here there everywhere, but how about the dead? how about the recoveries, nobody talks about that.

Why because statistics do not lie at least for now, CDC can not manufacture enough dead so what they do, the concentrations is on infections, but it does not tell that is a lot false positives within those numbers. But hey who cares as long as people are afraid of getting covid just for been alive.

a reply to: ketsuko

Florida is an odd case, yes restrictions are minimal lot of tourism all year around, but also most of the hospitals get filled with many of the tourist, because they get sick, test positive and count no as a positive from the state they come from but from the state where they test positive when they are visiting. I go to Florida often to get away from home, even when in my neck of the wood restrictions are not bad at all and life goes as usual.

a reply to: Lumenari

Have I told you lately that I like the way you think?

Here is some new information. It seem like the Unhinged left actually accomplished stopping a medical treatment that stopped covid...new unbias research since Trump is out of office is coming out.

www.sciencedirect.com...

Politics is interfering with proper medical treatments in this country, that has to stop and in this case the media and some Top Democrats need to be punished for causing harm to the general public because of their TDS.

I looked up the case stats for my state again.

Interesting how they changed the way the data is shown overnight. It used to be that they had a simple line graph showing day to day case numbers.

Now, they have the same simple line graph, but overnight it has been changed to show the 7-day rolling average in case numbers instead. Daily numbers of positives are instead being shown by pale blue bars behind the trend line.

It's a bit frustrating since we just scared 2 days in a row under 2,000 cases for the whole state. First time since summer, but switching the trend line to 7-day rolling average puts our case numbers back into the 2,500 range all over again. Makes it look worse than it is.

a reply to: ketsuko

A lot of people do not watch this things closely, after the second covid stimulus passed, cases in hospitals increased, flu has been none where to be found but covid is all over. Is all about money, the more covid the more money for hospitals, then we need to get that darn vaccine out there and into people before it expires..

a reply to: marg6043

I've been watching the case stats daily here, and this change was literally overnight. The tone of the local news headlines also shifted literally overnight. They used to be all "WE ARE GOING TO DIE!" level hysteria even with a downward trend. Today, they're two about the vaccines starting to go out into the 65+ crowd, and one about how daily case counts were under 2,000 for two days in a row!

Call me cynical, but I am sensing a trend right in time for Uncle Joe to "save" us all.

I don't need to read stats. COVID is not an issue. I know because I saw Drew Brees lick his fingers (multiple times) between every play on Sunday. Even in non-pandemic days, that's not very healthy.

Once again, we've all been played by the powers that be.

originally posted by: LogicalGraphitti
I don't need to read stats. COVID is not an issue. I know because I saw Drew Brees lick his fingers (multiple times) between every play on Sunday. Even in non-pandemic days, that's not very healthy.

Once again, we've all been played by the powers that be.

As long as he had a mask on under his helmet he's safe.