Clark County Public Health Clarifies CDC COVID-19 Provisional Death Data

Clark County Public Health issued a statement today regarding last week’s Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) provisional death data update. Here is their statement:

We’re seeing a lot of misunderstanding around new data from the CDC, and we need to set the record straight. Provisional death data updated by the CDC last week shows that for 6 percent of COVID-19 deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. The remaining 94 percent of deaths were among people with other underlying conditions.

This does not mean that only 6 percent of deaths are due to COVID-19. It means that for the other 94 percent, there were underlying conditions that likely made their COVID-19 illness worse and made them more at risk for serious illness and death.

There are different types of cause of death: immediate, underlying and contributing. For COVID-19, a common example might be an immediate cause of death of acute respiratory distress syndrome (which is what actually killed them), and an underlying cause of death would be COVID-19 or pneumonia from COVID-19 (which are the triggering factors that lead them to get the thing that actually killed them), and then contributing factors could be asthma, COPD, or diabetes (something that may have made their illness worse than it would have been).

As an underlying cause of death, COVID-19 is the thing that triggered the cascade of events that eventually leads to death. For example, older adults are more likely to have more contributing factors, but if they don’t get COVID-19, then they don’t start this cascade of events that lead to death.

None of this is new information. We’ve known that individuals with certain underlying conditions are at greater risk for severe illness and death. You can learn more about conditions that increase the risk of severe illness on the CDC website: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/people-with-medical-conditions.html

Clark County COVID-19 Update

Monday COVID-19 update: Since the last update on Friday morning, another 76 people have tested positive for COVID-19 and two people have died – a man in his 60s (unknown whether he had underlying health conditions) and a man in his 70s with underlying health conditions.

Over the weekend, Clark County had an average of about 25 new cases per day (Fri-Sun). To date, 2,610 Clark County residents have tested positive for COVID-19 and 51 people have died.

Nineteen COVID-19 patients are hospitalized and five persons under investigation (PUIs) for COVID-19 are hospitalized.