Is Winter the Most Deadly Time of the Year?
Winter is commonly associated in the US with being “the most wonderful time of the year” if you will. Christmas, Hanukkah, and the New Year are all Holidays in the wintertime that many people celebrate here in the US. When I think about Winter I often associate it with being around my family, having big celebrations, and generally it being a good time. However this may not be the case for everyone and not just because they do not celebrate during this time.
I remember being younger and as soon as it got cold my parents, teachers, and really any adults in my life were always insisting that we wear coats whenever we were outside. I also remember hearing that if you are outside in the cold, especially when it was snowing or raining, that you will get sick. This is something that I never really understood, I had been out and about in the cold constantly and if I got sick seriously doubted that it was due to being cold. Even as I got older I was a bit skeptical of the cold being what made you sick and figured that it really just gave a better environment for diseases to spread in. Unfortunately, I won’t be answering that question exactly in this post but what I will address is whether or not winter months are more deadly across the US.
I took a look at a data set from the CDC that outlined week over week the number and causes of death in the US. This data set breaks down the deaths into many categories including “All Causes”, “Natural Causes”, “Malignant Neoplasms”, “Heart Disease”, “Alzheimer's”, and many more. I was interested to see if the deadliest weeks of the year varied based on different diseases. I made some assumptions before I looked at it and thought that Heart Disease, Alzheimer’s, and Cancer would likely have some variation.
I started by looking at Natural Cause deaths essentially to get a baseline. From the years 2014 to 2023 the deadliest weeks were 53, 1, 52, 52, 2, 10, 53, 2, 3, and 1 respectively. So from the start, we can see that all of these weeks fall into the year’s colder months. I then looked into All Causes and received the same exact results. This was not too surprising but I wanted to take a look just to see if there were going to be any sort of differences.
Next, I decided to look at the “Malignant Neoplasms” column also known as cancer. This is where I started to become a bit more interested. I will admit that I would consider myself extremely uneducated on health and medicine generally and maybe this blog post really highlights my ignorance. But that being said I did expect to see far more variation across the deadliest weeks in this category. Again from 2014 to 2023 the deadliest weeks were as follows; 47, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 49, 2, and 8. Again we can see that these weeks are in the colder months. What really surprised me was the reoccurrence of week 2 across 6 of the years.
I then looked at the “Heart Disease” and “Alzheimer’s Disease” columns. These were both categories that I again expected to see more variation and was once again incorrect. For both categories, the most deadly weeks were all in the winter and within 10 weeks of the first of the year.
All in all, I was pretty surprised that there was so little variation across almost 10 years. There was not a single year that had a crazy week outside of the winter which was incredibly surprising to me. I think that this may be due to my lack of knowledge on the subject. I also do not think that it is too crazy to say that there are probably other people out there in my same shoes who would not have expected this. All of the diseases that I looked at are diseases that you are not just going to “catch” going in public generally but in class, we also looked at the flu and pneumonia which do fit more into that category and it is the same story there as well. At the risk of sounding quite morbid, I can confidently say winter is the most deadly time of the year. It makes me feel as though I will move forward being considerably more careful regarding getting sick in the winter time.
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