Deaths by Cause (NCHS Rankable Causes)

Limitaciones

Deaths by NCHS rankable cause and county of residence; the Georgia Rankable and Detailed topics count the same deaths: never add across them. OASIS withholds rates on 1-4 deaths (NULL). race_unknown and all_other_causes (deaths in no category; Georgia 2024: 17,404) are our counts, with no rate. Compare with the age-adjusted rate, never by adding rates. Race groups are NULL in 52 county-years (2000-2006) with over 20% unknown race or ethnicity; small groups' series break before 2015, not trends. Age-adjusted rates are OASIS's: weighted averages of age-specific rates with the year 2000 U.S. standard million as weights, so places and groups with different age mixes compare fairly; they never add or average across rows. OASIS publishes every count, however small, and withholds rates based on 1-4 events (NULL here); the platform adds no small-cell suppression of its own and never recomputes a withheld rate. A group with no residents in a place (num_population 0) has no rate (NULL): OASIS shows 0 there, but a rate on no population is undefined and would rank as the lowest (our mask; the count stays 0 unless the race mask NULLs it). 56% of rows with at least one death have no age-adjusted rate, mostly 1-4 deaths in small counties, small groups and rare causes. Race groups follow the platform convention from OASIS's race x ethnicity cross: hispanic is Hispanic of any race; white, black, asian, native_american (American Indian or Alaska Native), pacific_islander (Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander) and multiracial are non-Hispanic. race_unknown is our calculation, the total minus those seven (unknown ethnicity, or non-Hispanic of unknown race), so the race groups add up to all wherever the race mask (below) leaves them; it has no population and so no rate. Hispanic ethnicity is under-reported on death certificates, so hispanic counts and rates may be low. The smaller race groups' series break in ways that look like changes in how race was recorded, not in mortality (our reading): Georgia's multiracial deaths were 0-16 a year in 2000-2007, then 253 in 2008, 8 in 2009 and 325 in 2012; native_american's age-adjusted rate fell from 1,227.8 (2005) to 89.3 (2008); asian deaths went 404, 191, 417 in 2005-2007; and 1,027-1,960 deaths a year in 2000-2006 are race_unknown (mostly unknown ethnicity), against at most 371 since, so the non-Hispanic groups are undercounted then. Multiracial rates stay far below every other group's (Georgia 2024, all causes: 102.2 against 762.2 for all races), probably because death certificates record more than one race far less often than population estimates do (our reading): don't compare them with other groups, and don't read the small groups' changes before 2015 as trends. Where race or ethnicity is unknown for more than 20% of a place-year's deaths (race_unknown / all), the race groups' counts and rates for that place and year are NULL (our mask, OASIS's own 20% threshold for missing items): each group's count would miss its share of the unknowns, so its rate runs low and its trend follows the recording, not the group. The all, sex and race_unknown rows are kept, so the unknown share stays visible. It applies to 52 county-years (10 counties, 2000-2006, never Georgia), on every cause: in those years a race group's county deaths can add up to less than Georgia's race row, which counts every county. num_population is OASIS's own population (its population module) for the place, year and group, the denominator of every crude rate (num_deaths / num_population x 100,000 reproduces each published crude rate); the race groups' populations add to all, as do male and female. all_other_causes is all minus the 48 categories: 12% to 21% of Georgia's deaths a year, 2000-2025. Georgia's all_other_causes jumps for one year in 2008 (13,166), 2012 (14,897) and 2015 (14,864), about 1,300 to 1,900 deaths above the average of the years before and after: in OASIS's Detailed list (deaths_by_cause_detailed) the extra deaths are in none of its 15 cause groups, mostly ill-defined or unknown causes (ICD-10 R codes), probably deaths whose cause was still pending (our reading; OASIS documents no reason). NCHS ranks 52 causes; OASIS's list lacks four (Clostridium difficile infection, pregnancy and childbirth, complications of medical and surgical care, operations of war), whose deaths are in all_other_causes, as are drug overdoses of undetermined intent (OASIS's list has no such category). unintentional_injuries includes unintentional drug overdoses, falls and motor vehicle crashes; suicide includes drug suicides; covid_19 is 0 before 2020. Dementia deaths moved between causes in 2014-2016 (our reading: a change in how they were coded, not in how many people died): Georgia's alzheimers_disease nearly doubled, from 2,042 in 2013 to 4,017 in 2016, while all_other_causes, which holds unspecified dementia (the NCHS list does not rank it), fell from 14,382 to 12,726: don't read either series across 2014-2016 as a trend. From 2014 on, dementia deaths also moved into senile degeneration of the brain (G31.1, in all_other_causes here): 5 Georgia deaths in 2013, 3,947 in 2025 (dementia_deaths), while alzheimers_disease's age-adjusted death rate fell from 47.8 (2018) to 30.9 (2025) and unspecified dementia fell too; the three together held steady, so this is probably coding as well (our reading): don't read alzheimers_disease or all_other_causes as a trend after 2013. Deaths are placed by county of residence as OASIS geocodes it, so about 4% land in a different county than in the federal NCHS files. 2025, the newest year, was added to OASIS on 2026-07-29; OASIS marks no year provisional. Counties add up to Georgia, except a race group's deaths in a year the race mask NULLs some of its county rows. Not served: OASIS's SES-vulnerability rows (its SES 'rates' divide by the whole place's population), age and education breakdowns, and the significance-flag and percent measures. tract_geoid is always NULL.