Tag: United States

US suicides dropped amid coronavirus, defying pandemic expectations

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.foxnews.com/health/us-suicides-dropped-amid-coronavirus-defying-pandemic-expectations

Excerpt:

The number of U.S. suicides fell nearly 6% last year amid the coronavirus pandemic — the largest annual decline in at least four decades, according to preliminary government data.

Death certificates are still coming in and the count could rise. But officials expect a substantial decline will endure, despite worries that COVID-19 could lead to more suicides.

….

U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national suicide rate hit its highest level since 1941. The rate finally fell slightly in 2019. Experts credited increased mental health screenings and other suicide prevention efforts.

The number fell further last year, to below 45,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report. It was the lowest number of U.S. suicide deaths since 2015.

Author(s): Associated Press

Publication Date: 9 April 2021

Publication Site: Fox News

Mortality with Meep: Top Causes of Death in the United States in 2020

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/mortality-with-meep-top-causes-of

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Excerpt:

You’ll see that among adults, the age range with the most suicides are people age 50-55. That’s due to two things: the number of people in that age range (early Gen X, so tailing off from Boomers) and the rate. For each age group far more males die by suicide than do females.

You can see that deaths by suicide in number drop off in old age…. but that’s because the population is dropping off in size (as mortality rates accelerate at high ages).

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 12 April 2021

Publication Site: STUMP at substack

US suicides dropped last year, defying pandemic expectations

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-04-suicides-year-defying-pandemic.html

Excerpt:

The number of U.S. suicides fell nearly 6% last year amid the coronavirus pandemic—the largest annual decline in at least four decades, according to preliminary government data.

Death certificates are still coming in and the count could rise. But officials expect a substantial decline will endure, despite worries that COVID-19 could lead to more suicides.

It is hard to say exactly why suicide deaths dropped so much, but one factor may be a phenomenon seen in the early stages of wars and national disasters, some experts suggested.

Author(s): Mike Stobbe

Publication Date: 9 April 2021

Publication Site: Medical Xpress

Covid 3/25: Own Goals

Mary Pat Campbell
Covid 3/25: Own Goals

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Excerpt:

Those developments are infuriating, and also enlightening as to how the system of the world functions these days, but the main event remains the race between new strains and vaccinations. 

In America the race is plausibly close. Cases are rising, and likely will continue to rise for several more weeks, especially if vaccination rates continue to stagnate. But that acceleration should start soon, and at an additional 3% protection per week that grows and compounds, the vaccinations won’t take that long to turn the tide even if they don’t accelerate much. 

In Europe the race is not so close. Vaccinations are running far slower, with no short term hope for things to get much better. The recent own goals only made a bad situation worse, and in many European countries things are looking quite bad. Lockdowns are once again the order of the day in many places, most notably Germany, and yet the situation is getting rapidly worse, in some places reaching crisis proportions.

Publication Date: 25 March 2021

Publication Site: The Zvi

Europe Confronts a Covid-19 Rebound as Vaccine Hopes Recede

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-confronts-a-covid-19-rebound-as-vaccine-hopes-recede-11615558520

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Excerpt:

The European Union’s fight against Covid-19 is stuck in midwinter, even as spring and vaccinations spur hope of improvement in the U.S. and U.K.

Despite months of restrictions on daily life, new Covid-19 cases have been rising again in the EU since mid-February, as more-virulent virus strains outpace vaccinations.

By contrast, virus infections and deaths have been falling rapidly in the U.S. and U.K. since January as inoculations take off among the elderly and other vulnerable groups. U.S. infections and deaths, which were higher on a per capita basis for most of 2020, have fallen below the EU’s.

Author(s): Marcus Walker in Rome, Bertrand Benoit in Berlin and Stacy Meichtry in Paris

Publication Date: 12 March 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Finding ‘Anomalies’ Illustrates 2020 Census Quality Checks Are Working

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2021/03/finding_anomalies.html?utm_campaign=20210309msc20s1ccpuprs&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

Excerpt:

So far in 2020 Census processing, 27 of the 33 anomalies we’ve found are of this type. Let me give a couple of examples.

Miscalculating age for missing birthdays. We found that our system was miscalculating ages for people who included their year of birth but left their birthday and month blank. We fixed this with a simple code correction. Making sure ages calculate correctly helps us with other data processing steps for matching and removing duplicate responses.

Incorrectly sorting out self-responses from group quarters residents. The 2020 Census allowed people to respond online or by phone without using the pre-assigned Census ID that links their response to their address. As a result, some people who live in group quarters facilities, such as nursing homes, were able to respond on their own even though they were also counted through the separate Group Quarters Enumeration operation. This also makes their address show up as a duplicate — as both a group quarters facility and a housing unit. Our business rules sort out these duplicate responses and addresses by accepting the response coming from the group quarters operation and removing the response and address appearing as a housing unit. We found an error in how this rule was being carried out. The code was correctly removing the duplicate address but wasn’t removing the duplicate response. We fixed this with another code correction, which enables us to avoid overcounting these residents. 

Author(s): MICHAEL THIEME, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR DECENNIAL CENSUS PROGRAMS, SYSTEMS AND CONTRACTS

Publication Date: 9 March 2021

Publication Site: U.S. Census Bureau

U.S. Set to Power Global Economic Recovery From Covid-19

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-set-to-power-global-economic-recovery-from-covid-19-11615129203?mod=djemwhatsnews

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The world economy is likely to grow by around 6% this year, according to Oxford Economics, the fastest rate in almost half a century, as vaccine campaigns allow pandemic restrictions to be lifted and businesses to snap back.

For the first time since 2005, the U.S. is expected this year to make a bigger contribution to global growth than China, said the research firm. After the 2008 financial crisis, the global economic recovery was powered by China, as the U.S. experienced the weakest revival since the Great Depression.

Author(s): Tom Fairless

Publication Date: 7 March 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Why reopening US schools is so complicated

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/05/1020304/reopening-us-schools-complicated/

Excerpt:

The US can look to Europe for how this played out: European countries tried in-person learning last fall but began closing schools as B.1.1.7 swept through the continent. By December, countries including the Netherlands and Germany had shut down their schools in the face of rising case numbers. The CDC says it may need to update school reopening guidelines in light of new information about variants. 

This task is made more difficult because tracking the spread of variants in the US is tough right now. Compared with other countries, it has very few labs doing this work, and while more funding will help, Friedrich says there will still be a gap.

Author(s): Mia Sato

Publication Date: 5 March 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

Forecasters Predict COVID-19 Case Counts Will Keep Falling

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2021/03/04/forecasters-predict-covid-19-case-counts-will-keep-falling/

Excerpt:

Forecasters are predicting that U.S. COVID-19 case counts and the U.S. COVID-19 death numbers will continue to improve over the next four weeks.

Most of the forecasters in the COVID-19 Forecast Hub system say weekly new case counts will be somewhere between 350,000 and 450,000 over the next four weeks, compared with an actual number of about 477,000 recorded during the week that ended March 1.

The forecasters are predicting the number of deaths per week will fall to about 6,000 to 8,000, from about 14,000 per week, over that same four-week period.

Author(s): Allison Bell

Publication Date: 4 March 2021

Publication Site: Think Advisor

US life expectancy drops a year in pandemic, most since WWII

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://apnews.com/article/us-life-expectancy-huge-decline-f4caaf4555563d09e927f1798136a869

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Excerpt:

Life expectancy in the United States dropped a staggering one year during the first half of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic caused its first wave of deaths, health officials are reporting.

Minorities suffered the biggest impact, with Black Americans losing nearly three years and Hispanics, nearly two years, according to preliminary estimates Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“This is a huge decline,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees the numbers for the CDC. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this.”

Author(s): MARILYNN MARCHIONE

Publication Date: 17 February 2021

Publication Site: Associated Press

Trends in Premature Deaths Among Adults in the United States and Latin America

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2760668

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Excerpt:

Results  During 2001 to 2015, 22 million deaths (8 million women and 14 million men) occurred among individuals aged 20 to 64 years in the selected populations. Among women, US Latina individuals had the lowest premature mortality rates (ASMR for 2015, 144 deaths per 100 000 population) and US African American women had the highest premature mortality rate (ASMR for 2015, 340 deaths per 100 000 population) of the 16 populations studied. Rates among US white women shifted from the sixth lowest in 2001 (ASMR, 231 deaths per 100 000 population) to the 12th lowest in 2015 (ASMR, 235 deaths per 100 000 population). Among men, Peru had the lowest premature mortality rates (ASMR for 2015, 219 deaths per 100 000 population), and Belize had the highest premature mortality rates (ASMR for 2015, 702 deaths per 100 000 population). White men in the United States shifted from the fifth lowest rates in 2001 (ASMR, 396 deaths per 100 000 population) to the eighth lowest rates in 2015 (ASMR, 394 deaths per 100 000 population). Rates for both women and men decreased in all the populations studied from 2001 to 2015 (average annual percentage change range, 0.4% to 3.8% per year) except among US white populations, for which the rate plateaued (average annual percentage change, 0.02% per year [95% CI, −0.3% to 0.2% per year] for women; −0.2% per year [95% CI, −0.4% to 0.0% per year] for men) and among Nicaraguan men, for whom the rates increased (0.6% per year [95% CI, 0.2% to 1.0% per year]). The populations with the lowest mortality rates in 2015 had lower rates from all major causes, but rates were particularly lower for heart disease (21 deaths per 100 000 population) and cancer (50 deaths per 100 000 population).

Author(s): Yingxi Chen, MD, PhD; Neal D. Freedman, PhD; Erik J. Rodriquez, PhD; et al

Publication Date: 12 February 2021

Publication Site: JAMA