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A12 HEALTH
Tuesday 17 May 2022

Death certificates reveal that US hit

grim COVID milestone

This May 13, 2020 photo made with a fisheye lens shows a list of the confirmed COVID-19 cases in
Salt Lake County early in the coronavirus pandemic at the Salt Lake County Health Department,
in Salt Lake City.
Associated Press
By MIKE STOBBE PORTS that it was appropriate to
AP Medical Writer With information on death remark on it.
NEW YORK (AP) — When certificates slow to arrive, HOW THE TALLIES HAVE
the U.S. hit 1 million CO- experts and news organi- CHANGED
VID-19 deaths on Monday, zations began looking to As the pandemic dragged
the news was driven by a other real-time sources of on, many states cut back
government tally derived deaths. They turned to state on posting case and death
from death certificates. health department tallies numbers — some to just
But that's not the only tally. derived from preliminary once a week.
And you may be wonder- reports that were mainly "We've lost a lot of imme-
ing, where do these num- of people diagnosed with diacy in our reporting." Em-
bers come from? A look COVID-19 who went to a ily Pond, a Johns Hopkins
behind the data: hospital and died. Such research data analyst, said
DEATH CERTIFICATES data was more timely than in an email.
Deaths certificates have death certificates, which At the same time, the num-
long been considered the can take weeks to fill out bers based on death cer-
most comprehensive re- and process. tificates rose faster. One
cord of deaths and their Johns Hopkins University be- reason: Investigators have
causes. The Centers for came a leader in searching been going back and
Disease Control and Pre- state health department adding several thousand
vention systematically col- websites and rapidly ana- deaths in which COVID-19
lects information from all lyzing and posting those was not named initially but
50 states to track fatalities numbers. was identified later after
from all causes, including OTHER COUNTS autopsies or other medical
cancer, drug overdoses Other organizations have investigations, said Robert
and now COVID-19. their own counts, includ- Anderson, who oversees
But early in the pandemic, ing NBC News, which two death data for the CDC's
officials recognized the weeks ago reported that National Center for Health
COVID-19 data was slug- the U.S. had surpassed 1 Statistics.
gish and incomplete. million COVID-19 deaths, Most of those deaths hap-
Testing was often unavail- but did not explain in its pened early in the pan-
able. In some places — es- story how it arrived at that demic, when COVID-19
pecially rural ones — coro- figure. Last week, federal was still new and underdi-
ners or medical examin- officials issued statements agnosed. Anderson said
ers did not have the staff about the nation hitting many were relabeled last
to ask about coronavirus 1 million deaths, even year, largely in response
symptoms when people though the U.S. govern- to a Federal Emergency
died at home. Even when ment's own data had yet Management Agency pro-
information was available, to show it. Based on lags in gram that began providing
overworked doctors could the reporting of death cer- funeral assistance for fami-
be slow to do the death tificate information, officials lies who could produce a
certificate paperwork. concluded it was likely the death certificate attribut-
DEATHS FROM CASE RE- milestone had passed and ing a death to COVID-19.q