Winter Deaths in Middle Aged Midwesterns
*** The chart below is ALL DEATHS, not COVID specific. Seems from comments there might be confusion. Also, I have updated the original charts. The way the CDC provides the data makes it easy to double-count. The charts look the same, but the scale is ~1/2 what it was before.
I’ve been poking around with the weekly deaths (all deaths) by age group & state from 2015-present. Something fairly curious popped out to me & I don’t have an explanation. In the below, rather than using calendar year, I have grouped by “flu season”. I don’t know the precise way they define a flu season, but for our purposes, I have simply grouped Nov-Feb into a season. So, season 2021-22 runs from Nov ‘21 to Feb ‘22. With this grouping, deaths should be at their highest in 2020-21 (purple bars below) as this the pre-vax major COVID wave. The below chart looks at 3 midwestern states (Iowa, Illinois, Indiana) for the 45-64 year olds for weeks 51- week 6 (roughly 2nd half December to end of February) for the last 8 flu seasons:
Yikes! Why is this age group dying in such huge numbers in this last season (2021-22)? The pink bars in most cases jump off the page. Not only greatly exceeding the 2015- early 2020 (pre-COVID years), but also in most cases greatly exceeding the bad winter in 2020-21.
In initial looks, I am not necessarily seeing this across all states, so I need to find a way to examine more comprehensively, but interesting that the pattern holds across 3 neighboring states.
Addendum
For Gail, here is OH. You can see COVID effect in purple, but look at the pink! 😨
If I had to take a wild guess, I would say that group did not get previous infections from similar viruses. We have examples of entire cohorts like this with the Flu. Some have even speculated that masks were not what prevented South Korea from the first waves but it was in fact previous infections that gave them some level of protection.
I live in Ohio, what are the stats like for us? I don't know anyone in those ages who died over that time, so it's nothing I've noticed. I'm just curious now... because I live very close to Indiana.