National Center for Health Statistics Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

At Friday’s regular COVID-19 briefing, 36 unreported deaths in West Virginia were verified by the National Center for Health Statistics.

The reconciliation comes after the federal agency suffered an outage relating to a data system update. It left the center unable to verify deaths across all 50 states from June 6 to June 20.

Two recent deaths were also announced during Gov. Jim Justice’s COVID-19 briefing. These include the deaths of an 81-year old man from Preston County and a 67-year old woman from Raleigh County.

This brings the total in-state deaths to 7,056 since the start of the pandemic.

There are currently 2,135 active coronavirus cases in West Virginia. That number includes 196 hospitalized, 23 ICU patients, and six patients on ventilators, according to Justice and the Department of Health and Human Resources. The number of active cases has increased by around 200 since Justice’s last COVID-19 briefing on Wednesday.

Nearly 55 percent of all West Virginians are fully vaccinated, according to the DHHR’s COVID-19 dashboard. Children above the age of 6 months old are now also eligible for the vaccine as of last week.

Nearby vaccine sites can be found online or at 1-833-734-0965. COVID-19 testing sites can also be found online.

A new report shows that West Virginia is one of five states with the highest death rates in the country. The leading cause is heart disease.

In 2017, Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma and West Virginia had the highest death rates in the U.S., according to a report released Thursday from the National Center for Health Statistics.

States with the lowest death rates in 2017 were California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Minnesota and New York. Death rate is calculated as the percent of a population that dies within a given time.

Along with heart disease, other leading causes of death were cancer, stroke and lower respiratory diseases like pulmonary disease.

If you were a young or middle aged adult living in one of the five states with the highest death rates in 2017, you were more than twice as likely to die than your peers living in one of the states with the lowest death rates.

Nationwide, deaths among men were higher than women.

The older you get, especially for people in the 85 plus range, the gap between states with the highest rates and lowest death rates closes.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Marshall Health and Charleston Area Medical Center.

Tag: National Center for Health Statistics

Unreported COVID-19 Deaths Verified By National Center

Report: West Virginia Has One Of The Highest Death Rates In The U.S.