States Ranked by Age-Adjusted COVID Deaths

Data updated on December 7, 2022

We’re inundated with statistics on how US states have fared relative to one another throughout the pandemic. Sometimes these can appear contradictory because the data can be cut to support a variety of narratives. We wanted an updated source of cumulative age-adjusted COVID-19 deaths by state, as death is an important measure of the impact of a pandemic, and states have adopted widely divergent policies.

While COVID-19 deaths are usually adjusted for state population (deaths per 100,000), they are usually not adjusted for the age distribution of a state. It’s important to adjust for age when considering state-to-state differences in outcomes as age is the dominant risk factor for death provided someone is infected with COVID, and state age distributions vary considerably. In the following analysis, we present age-adjusted cumulative COVID-19 deaths and rank each state plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia accordingly. We generated the plot and table using the CDC’s Provisional COVID-19 Death Counts by Sex, Age, and State database, which sourced its data from death certificates. These numbers are more consistently processed across states, though they may differ slightly from other sources.