During the height of the pandemic, there were several mask and social distancing mandates being enforced for the general public. We are all used to masks by now, and we understand the importance of social distancing. However, have these newly adopted strategies actually helped limit the spread of other communicable diseases? Do these new strategies impact communicable death counts, as reported by the CDC? Inherently all states are different, consisting of many different factors that can impact one’s health as well as one’s risk to contract disease. Some factors that affect public health could be, s political ideology, population size, climate, socioeconomic status, and many others. The effects of a pandemic, and having the general population socially distancing, as well as wearing masks must have had some direct effects on communicable deaths. From pre-pandemic to present (2016–2021), to what extent did adopting new strategies to combat the spread of disease affect how many people died of communicable diseases?
2019, 2020, and 2021 have been interesting years and can provide us with interesting statistics unmatched by previous years. Moreover, we can look at how different causes of death have changed over the last couple of years. For this analysis, I want to compare 2019, 2020, and 2021, to the previous 2 years (2016–2018). I want to focus on the differences in counts between causes of death between these 5 years, as some have been impacted by the pandemic, and others have not. My hypothesis is that communicable disease deaths will be significantly less compared to years prior to the global pandemic. To test this, I am going to use the CDC Deaths 2014–2021 CSV file. For these tests, COVID-19 deaths, heart-related deaths, as well as cancer deaths have been removed. For later analysis COVID-19 related deaths will be brought back.
First, I created a dataframe to show the sum of communicable deaths for specific years. This dataframe is in chronological order 2016–2021. Displaying the total sum of each year’s communicable deaths, we can see a trend of consistent increase in communicable deaths up till 2019, when the pandemic started.
I then calculated the difference in the sum of communicable deaths per year, which resulted in some interesting numbers. There seems to be a consistent pattern, however, there are some outliers. First, 2019/2020 has an increase in communicable deaths. This outlier is caused by 52 additional entries in 2020’s data. Besides this outlier, there is a consistent decrease in communicable deaths after the pandemic hit the USA. We can see a large 30% decrease in deaths between 2020 and 2021. While years prior to the pandemic, 2016 and 2017 saw an increase of nearly 10%.
The causes of these differences can be attributed to more than just combating communicable diseases during the pandemic. A state’s political standing can also affect the number of communicable deaths. Due to limitations, my analysis here doesn’t use as much data, however, there is still a clear pattern between states with similar population sizes, as well as only data from 2020. COVID-19 deaths are also being added back for this analysis. There is still a sizable variation between ‘blue’ states and ‘red’ states with communicable deaths. Colorado and Nevada both have smaller count values, meaning fewer deaths in those states when compared to South Carolina and Iowa.
The evidence here is both mixed but clear that there were significant changes in the communicable deaths per year, as the pandemic forced new regulations and safety guidelines. These infectious diseases generally saw a large decrease in deaths over the pandemic, however, there is a large amount of variation in the number of deaths a year, some years saw an increase in deaths but generally, most years during the pandemic saw a decrease in non-covid related communicable deaths. This supports my hypothesis that the pandemic helped limit the spread of communicable diseases.
