Beyond Deaths per Capita: Comparative CoViD-19 Mortality Indicators

The number of CoViD-19 deaths is a lagged but more reliable indicator of the disease progression across populations than the number of confirmed cases. With substantial age and sex differences in CoViD-19 mortality, that number should be adjusted for the age-and-sex composition of the population as well as its total size. Following well-established practices in demography, this article discusses several period measures based on cumulative numbers of CoViD-19 deaths up to a point in time and illustrate them with weekly-updated data from 386 national and subnational populations. First is an unstandardized occurrence-exposure rate comparable to the Crude Death Rate. The peak estimate for New York exceeded the state most recent annual Crude Death Rate and remains the highest on record. Second, an indirectly standardized rate is shown to perform quite like a directly standardized rate but without requiring an age-and-sex breakdown of CoViD-19 deaths. Relative to the US, standardization lowers death rates in European populations and increases them in most other populations, with the highest standardized rates currently found in subnational Mexican and Peruvian populations. Last, projected end-of-the-year CoViD-19 death tallies can be translated into reductions in 2020 life expectancies, which could exceed two and a half years in Peru and Ecuador, and in various subnational entities from Baja California to Madrid and New York. To put these in perspective, the 1.5-year projected reduction for the US would bring 2020 life expectancy at birth to its lowest level since 2003 and induce its largest annual decline since World War II.