Roughly 98.2% of coronavirus deaths across Massachusetts were people who also had underlying health conditions, according to the latest data from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
The problem with that figure, however, is that there is only data available for roughly half of the 9,537 COVID-related fatalities — or 5,072, as of Tuesday — that have occurred since the beginning of the pandemic.
But state health officials, when asked by MassLive to supply the data in aggregate, declined to give additional information, including a breakdown of what those reported underlying medical conditions are and how the state is tracking the data.
In response to a records request from MassLive, the Department of Public Health said providing the data would “unduly burden (the Department) and interfere with its other responsibilities, namely, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
To get the data, health officials said they would have to manually review more than 9,000 records stored in the Massachusetts Virtual Epidemiologic Network, a database system known as MAVEN, to ensure documents and their attachments are redacted to protect patient privacy.
The Department of Public Health did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
In March, health officials began issuing reports detailing the age, county of residence and the status of pre-existing conditions of Massachusetts residents who died from COVID-19, but without detailing the conditions themselves. While DPH continues to provide regular updates on infection rates across cities and towns, it’s moved some of the more granular reporting — details about who among the sick are most vulnerable to the disease — to its weekly update, like a breakdown of case rates and death rates among age groups.
Some health experts think local reporting on underlying medical conditions could help researchers looking at health disparities fill in gaps in the data.
“It could be helpful just to get a look at that data, even if it’s a one-time look at it,” said Dr. Davidson Hamer, professor of infectious diseases and medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine and professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.
But such analysis is complicated, Hamer said, and may not yield anything new. The clinical picture of who is most vulnerable to severe COVID illness has remained relatively unchanged since the pandemic took root in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019.
Hamer says the major change is the devastating impact the disease can have on people with obesity, even young people.
“It took (COVID-19) moving to the United States that morbid obesity in particular was a major factor” in severe cases," Hamer said.
Research has shown that even moderately overweight people are at greater risk of dying from coronavirus, Science Magazine reports. A meta-analysis in “Obesity Reviews" showed that those obese who were sick with COVID were 113% more likely than people of healthy weight to be hospitalized, 74% more likely to be admitted to an ICU and 48% more likely to die, the magazine reports.
Other states like New York make data on underlying health conditions available. The New York State Health Department breaks down the top 10 underlying or pre-existing medical conditions for COVID deaths by age group. There, the most common conditions are hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, dementia, coronary artery disease, renal disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, atrial fibrillation, cancer and stroke.
Health departments where daily deaths are proportionately less across the country in smaller municipalities also seem to make that information readily available upon request; but others have similarly declined to give it out, citing concerns that the data would lead to “confusion and unwarranted apprehension,” health officials in Oregon told the Oregonian.
In New Jersey, where deaths rates were among the highest in the nation earlier in the health crisis, health officials there reported a 20% rise — from 48% to 68% — in the number of people who died of COVID-related illness between April and August with underlying health conditions, nj.com reports.
Of those more than 14,000 deaths in New Jersey, health officials there said 58% had cardiovascular disease, 44% had diabetes mellitus and 19% had some kind of neurologic or neurodevelopmental disorder or intellectual disability. Other comorbid conditions included cancer, chronic lung disease and chronic renal disease.
New Jersey officials said 32% of deaths either had no underlying disease, or it was unknown. In Massachusetts, by comparison, only 1.8% of the deaths processed in the daily dashboard were patients who did not have underlying health conditions, according to the Department of Public Health — a disparity that may speak both to reporting lag and differences in populations impacted by the disease.
The CDC analyzed 7,989 adult COVID patients between March 1 and May 31 to gauge what underlying health conditions they may also have. Officials found that 90.8% reported at least one underlying medical condition — the most common being hypertension, obesity, metabolic disease and cardiovascular disease.
Among 248 children hospitalized during that same time period, 50.8% reported at least one underlying medical condition, with the most common being obesity, asthma and neurologic disease, according to federal data.
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- Nearly half Mass. residents who’ve been tested for COVID have been re-tested
- Massachusetts state rep., trying to fill holes in college COVID-19 data, conducts her own analysis
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