Excess Deaths in Minnesota

It hasn’t been easy figuring out Minnesota’s death certificates.  A lot of data, not always coded consistently. I was hoping to see what the supposed coronavirus deaths actually looked like, and do some comparisons of deaths from various causes this year compared to earlier years.  I think I will get there eventually, but it is a tricky analysis, with several factors to be considered.  In the meantime, the CDC, which gets all the death certificates for every death from around the country, does do what it calls an excess death analysis, nationally and state by state.  The traditional use of these analyses is to monitor for spikes in a cause of death that may suggest a public health problem.  So here is what the CDC has for Minnesota.  This chart, taken from the CDC website, as I understand it from the CDC technical notes explaining its dashboard on excess deaths, includes deaths by underlying cause, that is the ultimate cause of the death.  This is the number of deaths for those cause groups since February 1, 2020, above the average from 2015 to 2019.   Note in particular Alzheimer’s and dementia–364 more deaths than average; hypertension–258 deaths over average, cancer–215 deaths above average; diabetes–128 deaths over average and ischemic heart disease (clogged arteries)–123 deaths above average.  All causes that are largely reflective of people missing needed care that could have prevented the death, and in the case of Alzheimer’s and dementias, as others have observed nationally, these patients suffered from increased isolation, and likely less staff attention as CV patients became the focus in nursing homes and other settings.  This is a total of 1397 deaths above average in Minnesota, getting close to the number attributed to coronavirus.  In my opinion, these are lockdown and terrorization deaths, due to the government responses to the epidemic, not the virus.

Please note that the state of Minnesota has all this data, before the CDC does.  They aren’t giving us anything, not one word on what has happened with suicides, with heart disease deaths, with cancer deaths, with deaths from other respiratory illnesses, deaths from dementias.  Nothing, and that lack of transparency and failure to provide data tells me that it is all bad news.  This is a message-heavy administration, trying to massage and portray everything in a certain light.  Hard to portray people dying from your screwed up actions in a positive manner.