In case you haven't noticed yet, I am a numbers guy. Numbers just stick in my brain sometimes. As a kid, I would pore over the stats on the backs of my basketball cards so often that I memorized them without even realizing it. Did you know that Shaq never averaged 30 ppg, but he did average 29.7 one year? Did you know that David Robinson actually scored 71 points on the final day of the season another year to finish with an average of 29.8 ppg? Sorry, Shaq! Numbers like those are still stuck in my head to this day; don't ask me why. (Note: I did feel obligated to check to see if I was remembering those correctly all these years later, and it turns out, that yes, they were correct.)
These days the numbers that I obsess over are a bit more morbid: we are approaching 170,000 total deaths and that total is increasing by over 1000 per day. At this point, we have all heard numbers like this so often that they start to lose all meaning. So, every once in a while I have to put them in context to regain some perspective. The New Atlantis had an article that compared COVID-19 death totals to other causes of death to provide some context. Sadly they appear to have stopped updating it, so I had to look elsewhere for some perspective.
Fortunately, the CDC has a database with most of the relevant data. So I set out to generate a similar figure for myself. Was this an elaborate excuse to learn how to create interactive charts in python and embed them in a website? Perhaps...
You should be able to hover over the plot to see the raw numbers and/or get the label for each curve.
There are a couple of things to point out here. The causes of death displayed here represent the top 15 causes of death according to the CDC (displayed in decreasing order) plus COVID-19. There are certainly some fluctuations in these totals, but I am displaying the monthly averages from 2014-2018 (the most recent year available) along with the monthly totals for COVID so far. I left off the results from individual flu outbreaks that the New Atlantis article had because I didn't feel like tracking them down.
I showed the plot to my wife (who is not a math person) and she said that it was hard to read and that a bar chart would be better because this just looks like the output from a heart monitor where someone died. As fitting as that may be, she might have a point about readability, so I decided to make some bar charts also.
Here are the estimated numbers of deaths for the above causes through the end of July. Again, these are just estimates except for COVID which is the total as of July 31st. For the other causes, I just took the average annual total for each cause and multiplied by 7/12 since we are 7 months into 2020. Is it just me or does it feel like we more time has elapsed than that?
The story here is that so far COVID is the third leading cause of death in the US and that is not likely to change. It is already right around the 12 month total for accidents and it is unlikely to catch cancer.
The downside of this approach is that it is averaging over 7 months and COVID in particular has seen a lot of variability from month to month. So, I decided to also look at monthly averages with the individual monthly totals for COVID for comparison.
The story here is that at the first peak in April, COVID actually surpassed cancer and heart disease as the leading cause of death nationwide. Since then it has dropped back to 3rd while continuing to outpace other causes by a substantial margin.
One other way of looking at this is to compute the percentages of the population have died/not died from each of these causes. Now, I have already ranted about why this is not a helpful way of thinking about mortality during a pandemic in a previous post. However, I keep seeing these types of percentages posted on social media devoid of context in order to downplay the severity of the pandemic, so I decided to post them in context with some other causes of death.
The story here is that if you want to talk about "survival rates", you should note that 99.5% of people haven't died this year (so far) from any cause. From this perspective, the fact that 99.95% of the population has not died from COVID doesn't seem quite as impressive. Similarly, the fact that around 10% of all deaths have been associated with COVID since this started is a bit more sobering.
So, there you have it: mortality by the numbers. This all begs the question, what do we do with this? I wish I had an answer. On the one hand, seeing the totals compared to other causes of death makes it clear just how serious the situation is. On the other hand, seeing the other causes of death serves as a reminder that death happens all the time. Most people don't spend their daily lives troubled by the number of people who are dying under normal (non-pandemic) circumstances, so why is it so hard to get the COVID death totals out of our minds? It's hard to say precisely.
One explanation is that many of the causes of death on the charts above are chronic conditions that cannot be prevented (at least not without radical long-term lifestyle changes). So although those deaths are sad, they also feel unavoidable. However, things like suicide, accidents, influenza/pneumonia, and COVID feel more preventable. It is much easier to wonder, could we have done something differently? What if a friend had reached out to those people before they committed suicide? What if they had been driving a little slower or been wearing a seat belt before the accident? What if more of us had been willing to get the flu vaccine? And what if we had been a little more prepared for or been a bit more careful during this pandemic?
I don't know if that line of thinking is constructive, but maybe it is not completely devoid of value. Maybe it will motivate us to be a bit more careful (I know I am going to make the flu shot a priority from here on out!), and maybe it will motivate us to cherish the time that we have a bit more. Will it? I hope so.