There has been entirely too much disinformation and misinformation from our Government, the Media and our Social Networks that I decided that I need to to go to the horses mouth and see exactly what is what. The Center for Disease Control is charged with maintaining mortality statistic and is required to publish this data for public inspection. The CDC does a fantastic job of recording a multitude of data on every death that occurs in this country. But there is nothing that says they have to publish this in a user friendly format!! And I can certainty testify to that!!
So, I spent quite a bit of time with this data creating template files that I could use to extract data that was user friendly and created a database of mortality totals and their cause categories from 2014 – 2020. I then wrote a simple Utility Program that access this data and presents it to the user in a human readable format with some selections to filter the data by year and Jurisdiction. I also added an option to compare total between different years.
For the Year 2020, the CDC added 2 COVID categories to their standard categories. One as the underlying cause of death and another where it was considered as a multiple cause of death. For each entity in the raw data where COVID was listed as a multiple cause of death, there was an additional entity for this same entity listing a primary case of death. So the overall totals for deaths for 2020 include both of these entities for some reason, even though they are for the same person. I do not know if this was an oversight on the part of the CDC or it was intentional for political purposes.
One thing that I did find interesting is the CDC breaks out New York City as a separate jurisdiction for the state of New York, and those numbers just might be staggering to some. Not very good for the Governor or the Mayor for that fact.
Populations number for each jurisdiction were retrieved from each states official website for vital statistics and demographics. The 2020 numbers are estimates provide by either the state if that number was available or from the US Census where that was available.
I am making this software available, free, to anyone that would like to use it for their own inspection. It will run only on a Windows 8 or 10 platform that has their .NET Framework updated to at least 4.7.2. I have included my Digital Developers Certificate in both the Installer and the program to keep the AV software scanners happy.
You can download the program from here CDC Mortality Utility
There is a lot more I can do with this data and include in this program, but I will have to be a gluten for punishment with 2 or 3 gallons of Scotch at the ready before I dive back into that muck they call data!
As a companion to this program, I have another Utiltiy that is based on the CDC Covid Death Statictis that are updated daily, Monday - Friday at around 1200 EST. There is an option in the File Menu to update the data driectly from the CDC website. A graphing option has bee added to graph these number by week or by month.
You can downlaod the program from here: COVID Statictics
