Massachusetts circulates a great daily report on C19 every day at 4 PM – the “COVID-19 Dashboard” is posted every day and contains a very detailed, 30+ page summary of the State’s Covid response reporting.

It must be very difficult to pull together these reports, and they are very thorough compared to other states. Why are they so hard to compare to Massachusett’s own annual death reports?

The ideal mortality report shouldn’t be so singularly focused on deaths from SARS-COV-19 and the Corona virus.

• Show the daily death totals.
• Assign every death to a category.
• The report should be an ‘accelerated’ reporting of the annual death data, just done on a daily basis.
• The current reporting as done is very difficult to compare to any other death reporting. Why?

Why does the Massachusetts Data look so different than other sources of mortality data?

• The age groups are different than the State’s own 2017 mortality report.
• The State of Massachusetts’s 2017 mortality report tracks different age brackets than the CDC shows.
• This data can’t be fixed by downloading the raw data / information – it still doesn’t line up.

The following are all constraints in how data is reported:

1. Lag in Data Reporting
2. Ability to Access Data Directly
3. Use of ‘Estimates’ and algorithms in base data
4. Inconsistent methods and terms with current data
5. Use of different age brackets
6. Region-to-region variability
7. Death definitions (included vs “due to”)