50 States of New COVID-19 Death Count Data

COVID-19 case count and hospital bed utilization indicators seem to be improving, but, for issuers of life insurance and annuities, the big question is what's really happening with death. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has supplemented the COVID-19 outbreak tracking indicators developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which seem to show that overall outbreak activity is low, with a new COVID-19 hospital capacity utilization map. The new HHS map seems to confirm what local public health officials, hospital administrators and news organizations are saying: People with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19 are filling 10% or more hospital beds throughout most of the South and Southwest. But the current map, based on hospitalization capacity utilization data reported as of Aug.3, looks a lot better than the capacity utilization map from a a week ago, which was based on data reported as of July 23.

Resources

• The CDC's weekly COVID-19 report is available here.
• The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic is available here.
• The HHS hospital capacity data is available here.
• An overview article about the COVID-19 data for the previous week is available here.

  Other organizations appear to be reporting a similar drop in hospital capacity utilization. The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, for example, says the number of hospital beds filled with patients with COVID-19 dropped to 53,303 Aug. 3, from 59,023 a week earlier. CDC officials reported in July that the median length of stay for a patient who entered a U.S. hospital and died of COVID-19 was about five days, but other studies have reported median lengths of stay of two weeks or more. That means states with peak COVID-19 hospitalization rates a week or two ago may be starting to experience high COVID-19 mortality levels now. The COVID-19 mortality level in a state depends partly on the age of the people in the state who get COVID-19 as well as the number of people infected, because older people are more likely to die from COVID-19 than younger people are. A comparison of COVID-19 death counts for the week ending Aug. 7 with cumulative death counts reported as of June 30 suggest that some states with very high hospital capacity utilization levels, such as Texas, are now facing rapid increases in the number of deaths. But some states without obvious spikes in COVID-19-related hospital utilization, such as Idaho and Montana, also appear to be facing big increases in the number of new COVID-19 deaths, relative to the June 30 baseline. When U.S. life insurers released their earnings for the second quarter, the figures appeared to imply that life insurers could face roughly $2 billion in life insurance claims per 100,000 COVID-19-related U.S. deaths. .

Percentage Change in COVID-19 Death Counts
	Total Deaths, June 30	New deaths reported for the week ending Aug. 7	Deaths in the week ending Aug. 7, as a percentage of the deaths recorded June 30	Population	Deaths for the week ending Aug. 7, per 100,000 people
Alabama	950	155	16.3%	4,903,185	3.16
Alaska	14	2	14.3%	731,545	0.27
Arizona	1,632	387	23.7%	7,278,717	5.32
Arkansas	270	68	25.2%	3,017,804	2.25
California	5,980	1,006	16.8%	39,512,223	2.55
Colorado	1,508	38	2.5%	5,758,736	0.66
Connecticut	4,322	9	0.2%	3,565,287	0.25
Delaware	509	3	0.6%	973,764	0.31
District of Columbia	551	4	0.7%	705,749	0.57
Florida	3,604	1,085	30.1%	21,477,737	5.05
Georgia	2,805	365	13.0%	10,617,423	3.44
Hawaii	18	3	16.7%	1,415,872	0.21
Idaho	91	46	50.5%	1,787,065	2.57
Illinois	7,124	130	1.8%	12,671,821	1.03
Indiana	2,640	58	2.2%	6,732,219	0.86
Iowa	715	46	6.4%	3,155,070	1.46
Kansas	270	22	8.1%	2,913,314	0.76
Kentucky	565	29	5.1%	4,467,673	0.65
Louisiana	3,221	258	8.0%	4,648,794	5.55
Maine	105	1	1.0%	1,344,212	0.07
Maryland	3,190	72	2.3%	6,045,680	1.19
Massachusetts	8,054	100	1.2%	6,892,503	1.45
Michigan	6,193	74	1.2%	9,986,857	0.74
Minnesota	1,476	41	2.8%	5,639,632	0.73
Mississippi	1,073	185	17.2%	2,976,149	6.22
Missouri	1,015	58	5.7%	6,137,428	0.95
Montana	22	10	45.5%	1,068,778	0.94
Nebraska	269	12	4.5%	1,934,408	0.62
Nevada	507	90	17.8%	3,080,156	2.92
New Hampshire	367	4	1.1%	1,359,711	0.29
New Jersey	15,029	63	0.4%	8,882,190	0.71
New Mexico	493	34	6.9%	2,096,829	1.62
New York	24,855	40	0.2%	19,453,561	0.21
North Carolina	1,343	210	15.6%	10,488,084	2.00
North Dakota	78	3	3.8%	762,062	0.39
Ohio	2,863	163	5.7%	11,689,100	1.39
Oklahoma	387	59	15.2%	3,956,971	1.49
Oregon	207	26	12.6%	4,217,737	0.62
Pennsylvania	6,649	108	1.6%	12,801,989	0.84
Rhode Island	950	7	0.7%	1,059,361	0.66
South Carolina	739	250	33.8%	5,148,714	4.86
South Dakota	91	14	15.4%	884,659	1.58
Tennessee	604	146	24.2%	6,829,174	2.14
Texas	2,424	1,527	63.0%	28,995,881	5.27
Utah	172	31	18.0%	3,205,958	0.97
Vermont	56	1	1.8%	623,989	0.16
Virginia	1,763	143	8.1%	8,535,519	1.68
Washington	1,320	89	6.7%	7,614,893	1.17
West Virginia	93	11	11.8%	1,792,147	0.61
Wisconsin	784	56	7.1%	5,822,434	0.96
Wyoming	20	2	10.0%	578,759	0.35
MEDIAN	784	56	10%		0.96

. — Read COVID-19 Might Have Caused $2 Billion in U.S. Life Claims So Far, on ThinkAdvisor. — Connect with ThinkAdvisor Life/Health on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.