Documenting COVID-19 and MuckRock's Uncounted Project

This repository contains data and findings used in an ongoing investigation into undercounted and uncounted deaths with the Documenting COVID-19 project, MuckRock, Columbia University's Brown Institute for Media Innovation and the USA TODAY network. More details on our Uncounted investigation.

Overview

The data in this repository comes from three sources:

1. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER database, which contains provisional cause of death data and is updated every few weeks (last updated: March 18, 2022)

2. Demographers from Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania, who have modeled excess deaths at the county level (last updated: Jan. 31, 2020)

3. The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, which has archived the U.S. Department of Justice's 2018 Census of Medical Examiner and Coroner Offices (last updated: Jan. 31, 2018)

Along with Documenting COVID-19's reporting recipe for the Uncounted project, the data can be combined to investigate counties with high amounts of unexplained excess deaths during the pandemic — deaths that point toward COVID-19 death undercounts.

Table of Contents

1. Data
2. Data Dictionaries

What useful things will you find in the data folder?

1. Excess mortality modeling by state, includes two datasets, one modeled by the CDC and a Boston University and University of Pennsylvania team led by Andrew Stokes, an assistant professor of global health
2. Several breakdowns of deaths by state from 2018 through 2022, including by race/ethnicity and by underlying causes of death.

• The spreadsheet of natural cause deaths includes several causes of death identified by the CDC as deaths that "could represent misclassified COVID-19 deaths, or potentially could be indirectly related to COVID-19." The spreadsheet shows which CDC category the cause of death belongs to and the specific code and underlying cause of death.
• The spreadsheet of external causes includes leading external causes of death in the 113 CDC code list. Like the natural cause spreadsheet, this spreadsheet shows which CDC category the cause of death belongs to and the specific code and underlying cause of death

Note: Any number of deaths under 10, whether from natural diseases or external causes, is suppressed by the CDC. No data is included for the causes of death from these 16 counties. In the county map accompanying this data, the counties whose data are supressed are: Denali Borough, Alaska; Lake and Peninsula Borough, Alaska; Skagway Municipality, Alaska; Valdez-Cordova Census Area, Alaska; Hinsdale County, Colorado; San Juan County, Colorado; Clark County, Idaho; Blaine County, Nebraska; Key Paha County, Nebraska; Logan County, Nebraska; Loup County, Nebraska; Thomas County, Nebraska; Wheeler County, Nebraska; Billings County, North Dakota; Harding County, South Dakota; and Borden County, Texas.

3. Vaccination rates by state and county, which can be cross-referenced to other datasets found in this repository
4. Each state's medicolegal death investigation system — coroner, mixed coroner/medical examiner or state medical examiner system
5. A Department of Justice survey of all medical examiner and coroner offices in the country, conducted in 2018 and published in 2021, provides the resources, personnel, tools, and caseload of your local death investigation system. The entire survey is included along with a paired-down version in a separate .csv file

Methodology and Caveats

Our investigation focused on underreporting COVID deaths, but not all excess deaths are COVID deaths. We cover this in our Uncounted "how to" guide:

The term “excess death” refers to the estimate of how many more people died in a given time period and region than expected. The expected number of deaths is derived through statistical modeling and typically accounts for changing mortality trends. Epidemiologists and demographers have used excess mortality to measure natural and non-natural disasters, such as during Hurricane Maria and opioid overdose deaths.

Measuring excess deaths helps determine how many more people are dying than a normal, pre-pandemic year, and the rest of the data in this repository serves to explain what those people are dying of, and possibly, why.

CDC WONDER data for 2021 and 2022 are provisional and not yet final. This means some numbers are still subject to change. If any numbers raise a red flag for you though, you should check the numbers out on the ground, by asking local practitioners or by contacting the National Center for Healthcare Statistics directly.

Questions and Feedback

The Documenting COVID-19 project can be reached at covid@muckrock.com