Health Department data shows lag in death totals

CASPER – When the Wyoming Department of Health announces that more COVID-19 patients in the state have died from the disease, it is often announcing deaths that actually occurred weeks if not months before.

The lag in reporting is a result of the time it can take for death certificates to be filed, department spokeswoman Kim Deti said.

The department does not count a patient as a coronavirus death unless COVID-19 has been listed on his or her death certificate as the cause of death or a contributing factor. And the time it takes for those certificates to be filed has always varied, even before the pandemic, Deti said.

The Wyoming Department of Health then must review that information before reporting the deaths to the public. 

Now, though, the department is offering comprehensive data on when each of those patients’ deaths occurred, providing an even more accurate look at the spike in deaths that has accompanied this fall’s surge in virus infections and hospitalizations.

Putting these new weekly figures alongside the number of deaths the state had reported each week suggests, grimly, that we have only begun to learn about the deaths that have occurred over the past two weeks in Wyoming. 

Take, for example, the week of Nov. 1. Thirty-five Wyomingites died of the coronavirus during that week, according to the state’s latest numbers. But during that time, just 27 deaths were reported. 

By the end of that week, 114 deaths had been reported since the start of the pandemic, but at least 167 total deaths had already occurred, we now know.

Similarly, the number of deaths the week before (29) substantially outstripped the number of deaths that were reported during the same time (19). That trend dates all the way back to the week of Sept. 27, roughly two weeks after Wyoming’s ongoing surge in COVID-19 cases began.

Over the last two weeks, however, the opposite has been true. Of the 176 deaths the state has made public since the start of the pandemic, nine have been attributed to last week and none have been attributed to this week. 

Meanwhile, 30 and 32 deaths have been reported during those weeks, respectively — the highest numbers of any weeks during the pandemic thus far.

In other words, these record-breaking death totals in November have largely been a result of the Wyoming Department of Health catching up on COVID-19 deaths that occurred in October. People that are currently dying of the virus are not yet reflected in numbers that nevertheless put Wyoming fourth in the nation in coronavirus deaths per capita over the past week, according to the New York Times.

Of the Wyoming COVID-19 deaths that we know about, 72 happened in October (37 deaths were reported that month). Forty-two have been attributed to the first three weeks of November. That number is only one behind the total for the first three weeks of October — and, remember, the Wyoming Department of Health has not yet announced a single death that happened this week.

Of course, there is no way to know for sure whether there are just as many unreported deaths out there now as there were in October — that is to say, whether the recent trend will continue. 

One would hope that we have not seen deaths attributed to this week not because of the wait for death certificates but because they simply have not happened. But, troublingly, during the past few weeks — that gap in time when deaths could have happened without us yet knowing — the trends that previously foreshadowed a rise in deaths have only gotten worse. 

Wyoming continues to set new records for active COVID-19 cases and hospitalized patients on a near-daily basis. 

In October, a total of 6230 coronavirus cases were confirmed in Wyoming. In the last two weeks alone, 9302 new cases have been confirmed. 

At its worst in October, the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the state reached 120. As of Friday, 219 virus patients were hospitalized.