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Coronavirus Age Distribution: Data from NYC
I found an excellent source of COVID-19 information from the New York City health department (here). As of 4:30 p.m. April 2, it reports a total of 1,562 deaths, about 25% of the national total. The site does note that the recent daily figures are not final, and the page appears to be updated periodically, so the figures and graphs may be different by the time you check.
The site has excellent information on the age distribution of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Here is their graph of deaths per 100,000, by age group:
The figures aren’t shown in the graph, but you can see them by pointing at the bars. As they may change at the site, I’ll document them here: 0-17 0.00; 18-44 2.67; 45-64 18.58; 65-75 53.78; 75+ 130.35.
They also report counts in a daily report (here). This page may also update daily, so the figures may change by the time you check. Here’s my graph of the raw counts for each age group:
The preponderance of deaths among older New Yorkers is again pronounced, though a bit less so than the prior graph, because the 65-75 and 75+ age groups have significantly fewer people than the other groups.
Here is the graph on hospitalizations per 100,000 in NYC by age group:
As you can see, COVID-19 hospitalizations are significantly skewed toward the old in NYC, though less so than deaths.
This data suggests that the heightened vulnerability of older people to COVID-19, reported in other countries, is also the case in the US.
I want to commend the New York health department for putting together a very fine site, with a great deal of useful information. It is particularly encouraging that they adjusted the graphs above by population for the various age groups, which better conveys the risks faced by the different age cohorts.
ChiCom delenda est.
Published in Healthcare
Great find!
Agree.
Jerry, I’ve been following the NYC data at their site for a couple of weeks. They just migrated it to the new site you referenced; before that they simply updated four PDF files a couple of times each day.
One odd (well, to me) thing about the hospitalization data I noticed. Until a few days ago when they migrated to the new site, the caption on the daily count of people hospitalized read “Cases Ever Hospitalized.” I’m not sure precisely what “ever” means in that context, but I took it to mean that it was a total count of people hospitalized, not a count of the number currently hospitalized.
Which invites yet more questions: What percentage of hospitalized people end up in the ICU? Of those who don’t, how long do they typically remain in the hospital? How many are in now? Etc.
One day we’ll presumably have fewer unanswered questions. Until then, it sometimes feels as if we’re drowning in unusable data.
WSJ has a story about a guy (54 years old, I believe) who was hospitalized in NYC and released. He was there for 3 days, given medication and oxygen, and released to recover at home. Now he’s donating plasma. I imagine there are quite a few cases like that.
Probably. The CDC guideline for presuming someone is “recovered” without actually performing a test (and that’s allowed) is that they be 72 hours free of fever and respiratory difficulty (including, I think, cough), and at least seven days from onset of first symptom.
And the CDC acknowledges that this is imprecise, since we have little experience with this pathogen, and that someone may still be contagious after this interval, but likely not as contagious as someone actively suffering from the infection.
It’s all very practical, which is interesting and surprising for me, since I have no experience with medicine and would have liked to imagine that it was more… precise.
And you were holding out on me?
Just kidding. The big spike in NYC only started about 10 days ago. It is quite a good data source, though.
Your questions are good ones, but this is good data on the age question, which is useful to have confirmed.
Heh. In the interests of not holding out on you again… are you familiar with this CDC graphic?
COVID-19 cases in the United States by date of illness onset
It’s two or three pages down on the site. I think it’s interesting, because it tries to provide a meaningful view of what was happening a week or two ago.
Jerry, do they give an explanation of why ages are grouped so irregularly in the bar graphs?
For example, “45-64” is twice the size of “65-75”; as well as blurring what we have seen in other statistics, that the virus is considerably more dangerous in the early 60s, than in the late 40s.
No, they don’t explain this. In demographic information that I’ve seen, it’s pretty common to group age cohorts in this way, though the cutoffs vary a bit. For example, depending on the issue, I’ve seen the “young adult” grouping range from 18-24, or from 18-34, or from 18-44.
18, 25, 35, 45, 65, and 75 are pretty common cutoffs. In a particular example, you might combine some groups because the numbers aren’t notably different between them.
Amazing. Old people more vulnerable.
And yet deaths in 45-64 yo are higher then the 65-75 yo cohort.
Not exactly limited to the elderly.
It would be interesting to see what medication that was.
I had the same question. With an illness that has such pronounced morbidity by age, its fairly ridiculous to be using 20+ year age bands, even at younger ages. They probably have enough credible data to do 5 year age bands at this point.
Doctor on CNN just said that 10-20% of US population already infected. That implies very high asymptomatic case level and waste of time to do economy lockdowns. Meanwhile, NY data implies low spread and low asymptomatic case level. Media needs to be questioning which is correct. We need answers, not virtue signaling.
This highlights the need for greater granularity of the data. New York’s reporting is, like everything to do with this epidemic, weirdly arbitrary.
The 45-64 cohort is too wide to make it useful. At the upper edge, there’s about a 1.8:1 mortality rate ratio between the next cohort up (65-75) and the 45-64 cohort. On the lower end, there’s about a 4:1 mortality rate ratio between the 45-64 cohort and the one below it, the (also too wide) 18-44.
If we adjusted the 45-64 group to be 45-59, and made the other group 60-74, what fraction of the deaths would move with them? Quite a big fraction, I suspect, given how quickly mortality seems to fall off with age.
Someone better at number crunching than I am could fit a curve to the too-large brackets provided by the state of New York and probably come up with a reasonable approximation of how fast the mortality curve rises at 50, 55, and 60 years. Certainly it plummets somewhere on the low end, given the fact that New York reports only a single death among 933 cases in the 0-17 age range.
Certainly old people are hit harder. One interesting question would be “what does ‘old’ mean in this context?” Unfortunately, NYC’s data is too clunky to tell us.
These graphs would be more interesting if they included the number infected in each age group, though I suspect they are only testing those who show up at a hospital or clinic.
The deaths per 100,000 graph shows that the death rate among 65-74 is about 3 times higher than among 45-64. The site didn’t give the demographic data, but I was about to calculate it from the reported death counts and rates. There are about 2.05 million people in the 45-64 cohort and about 700,000 in the 65-74 cohort.
That statistic is not available, and will not be available until widespread antibody testing is done or until a much larger supply of testing materials is available and testing can be done for data collection and not just clinical necessity.
Which points to how screwed up their age bands are. They take the mortalities of the age 55-64 band, which you would expect to be fairly close to the 65-75 (twice as many people with half the mortality rate?)…..and then lump those deaths with everyone 45-54…..which is a cohort that we desperately need good news on so we can get them back to work.
Based on the data linked to by the OP, I calculated the odds of dying of COVID-19 so far this year for those living in NYC who have no underlying condition.
I came up with 2 in a million.
That seems absurdly low, given the reports on the severity of the impact by the media and the government, and the fact that NYC is one of the most severely hit areas. So I hope someone will check my figures. It seems I must have made big mistakes.
If I didn’t, then this data has a silver lining. The conclusion would be:
= = = = = = = =
Calculations
I estimate the 0-44 years old population of NYC at 4.8 million, based on published data on the total population of NYC and the distribution of population in the US in 2020. The number of reported deaths to date in the data linked to by the OP, among 0-44 year-olds with “no underlying conditions” is 8. I added 2, which is my estimate of the number of additional deaths in this group that will appear once more data is collected.
Details
According to the deaths data linked to by the article, in the group under age 45, there were 8 deaths in the category “No Underlying Condition”. There were 19 listed as “Underlying Conditions Pending”. I assumed that means that they’ve not yet reported on presence of underlying conditions. To estimate the number of these that will turn out to be “No Underlying Condition”, I looked at the ratio of “No Underlying Condition” to those where the presence or absence of underlying condition is reported (74). I assumed that the same ratio will prevail once the data is reported on the 19, which yields an estimate of an additional 2 with “No Underlying Condition”.
That yields 10 reported deaths, out of a population of just under 5,000,000. That equals odds of 2 in a million.
It was in early March… I don’t think it was the chloroquine. My understanding was that it was the standard Tylenol+fluids.
and also any comorbidity conditions?
plus, how many people die because doctors, staff and facilities are pre-occupied with Sars-CoV2 situations?
Much better demographic data out of Florida. Age bands are consistently sized and hospitalization and mortality rates are very low for under 50’s. Seniors still overrepresented. Maybe NYC is an outlier.
https://twitter.com/donciccio807/status/1244685136983097344/photo/1