Public Health Releases Data on County Deaths

Source: Santa Barbara County Public Health Department

The Santa Barbara County Public Health Department has analyzed the most recent local death data available and has compiled a report highlighting key findings and trends. Death reporting is an essential component to understanding the health of our residents. Overall, the mortality rate of Santa Barbara County is 8% less than that of the state of California. This trend has persisted since 2010 and when looking at the age-adjusted death rate among residents, it has been decreasing since 2010.

The top leading causes of death when adjusted for age were cancer, heart disease, and unintentional injuries. All three top causes of death were higher among men compared to women. When looking at the last three years of available data, 2018 – 2020, compared to the prior three years, there were statistically significant decreases in death rates of Asian/Pacific Islanders, Multiracial, and Hispanic residents. During this time, there were increases in death rates among White Non-Hispanic residents. White Non-Hispanic residents had nearly three times higher death rates than Hispanic residents.

Analyzing death rates by region shows south county had 25% lower rates than central or north county. Central and north county had similar death rates. This data highlights geographical differences in mortality data. Understanding how geographical location impacts health is central to achieving health equity, a goal of the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department.

“This data indicates that residents in Santa Barbara County face different health outcomes based on their race/ethnicity and location in the county. A more detailed report will be published to further understand these trends by cause of death in the coming months,” said Joy Kane, Senior Epidemiologist.

This report also includes one complete year of COVID-19 death data from 2020. While this data is limited to the early stages of the pandemic, COVID-19 was the sixth leading cause of death in 2020. More current COVID-19 death data will be analyzed as soon as it is available. Read the full  Leading Causes of Death Report here.

SBC Public Health

Written by SBC Public Health

Public information provided by the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department. Learn more at https://www.countyofsb.org/410/Public-Health

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  1. Something I’ve been seeing in the data and saying all along (and condemned/insulted/belittled in response here) – now in writing from SB Public Health. If you’re 44 and under the death rate for covid was 3.5, for influenza it was 9.5. Meaning….. if your under 45 the flu was almost 3X more deadly than covid, and that’s before ‘vaccines’!! Many here trashed the Great Barrington Declaration which pushed for Focused Protection – putting our efforts into protecting the most vulnerable among us (i.e. delivering groceries to the elderly, addressing multi-generational households and nursing homes, etc.) while everyone else went about their lives with minimal change — all at a fraction of the TRILLIONS $$$ it cost us to shutdown the economy causing record job less, the record inflation we’re now facing and the recession to come. Yet we will never get an apology, let alone an admission they were wrong, from the fear mongering science deniers who pushed for shutting down our businesses and schools. Bravo!

    • Lies, lies, and more lies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration
      The Great Barrington Declaration was an open letter published in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns.[1][2] It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of “focused protection”, by which those most at risk could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise continued functioning normally.[3][4] The envisaged result was herd immunity in three months as SARS-CoV-2 swept through.[1][2][3] Authored by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, it was drafted at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, signed there on 4 October 2020, and published on 5 October.[2][5] The document presumed without evidence that the disease burden of mass infection could be tolerated, that any infection would confer long term sterilizing immunity, and it made no mention of physical distancing, masks, contact tracing,[6] or long COVID, which has left patients with debilitating symptoms months after the initial infection.[7][8]
      The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies have stated that the strategy is dangerous and lacks a sound scientific basis.[9][10] They say that it would be challenging to shield all those who are medically vulnerable, leading to a large number of avoidable deaths among both older people and younger people with pre-existing health conditions.[11][12] They warn that the long-term effects of COVID-19 are still not fully understood.[10][13] Moreover, the WHO said that the herd immunity component of the proposed strategy is undermined by the unknown duration of post-infection immunity.[10][13] They say that the more likely outcome would be recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination.[12] The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the Great Barrington Declaration “ignores sound public health expertise”, despite public health experts agreeing “better balance must be found between protecting public health and helping the economy”.[9] The Great Barrington Declaration received support from some scientists, the Donald Trump administration, British Conservative politicians, and from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.
      The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial.[14][15][16]

    • The 5 failings of the Barrington Declaration. Vor falls in #2 2. The Barrington declaration gives oxygen to fringe groups. The signatories did not intend to support such fringe groups, but their rhetoric invalidates public health policy and feeds the 19 per cent of North Americans who don’t trust public health officials.
      https://www.queensu.ca/gazette/stories/5-failings-great-barrington-declaration

    • https://www.queensu.ca/gazette/stories/5-failings-great-barrington-declaration
      5 Flaws of Barrington
      1. It creates a false dichotomy.
      2. The Barrington declaration gives oxygen to fringe groups.
      3. The Barrington declaration puts individual preference far above public good.
      4. The declaration misunderstands herd immunity.
      5. The declaration offers no details on how it would protect the vulnerable.
      Somebody must have been watching Tucker again.

    • “We also know from prior news reports those covid deaths are ‘with’ covid rather than just the ‘from’ covid.” Backing science and data for Santa Barbara county to validate your comment?
      From the CDC “Every person who dies with a confirmed or suspected COVID-19 case does not always have COVID-19 listed as a cause of death on their death certificate. The CDC issued guidelines in April 2020 about how to address COVID-19 in death certificates; as with all medical conditions and injuries, medical examiners, etc., should not cite coronavirus as a cause of death unless it was part of a chain of conditions that led to death.
      For example, if an individual dies in a car crash and is confirmed to have COVID-19 at the time, their death certificate would not include the virus as a cause of death unless the medical examiner determined it as the underlying cause of the crash.”

    • Here are links two examples in neighboring Ventura County – one slipped hit is head, other overdosed – both ruled Covid deaths. But if that’s all you got whatever, continue to ignore the devastation we caused our entire society, especially our children, for something that to those under 45, the flu is nearly three times more deadly, and that was before the covid shots! _______https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/2020/04/23/coronavirus-covid-19-california-update-ventura-county/3015868001/_______________ https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/2020/08/29/how-covid-19-death-calculations-comorbidities-work-ventura-county/3415327001/ _______________________

    • Haha that’s a joke of evidence. You seriously don’t know anything about science or statistics. You are also arguing for Ventura county – this is Santa Barbara, remember? You’re trying too hard. Go spend the afternoon with your family if they are done hanging from the rafters for the day.

    • Flu: The World Health Organization estimates that 290,000 to 650,000 people die of flu-related causes every year worldwide.
      The COVID-19 situation continues to change, sometimes rapidly. Doctors and scientists are working to estimate the mortality rate of COVID-19. At present, it is thought to be substantially higher (possibly 10 times or more) than that of most strains of the flu. Covid is more deadly for children than influenza. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-06-03/coronavirus-daily-covid-is-more-lethal-to-kids-than-the-flu

    • “my info is from the SB Public Health”
      No one knows where it’s from, since you offered no citation. All we get are your claims and misinterpretations.
      “you’re quoting stuff from Wikipedia’
      See all those numbers in brackets? Those are known as “citations” … in the Wikipedia article they are links to reliable sources, often peer-reviewed materials.
      “they were right, you were wrong AND have become a science denier. It’s right there in the data.”
      No honest person agrees with you.

    • PSTARSR read… the…. article…. Last sentence: “Read the full Leading Causes of Death Report here.” Click on that blue “here”. Worth noting, the influenza mortality rate is with the flue shots, the covid mortality rate is without the covid shots. We also know from prior news reports those covid deaths are ‘with’ covid rather than just the ‘from’ covid. Science and data deniers are free to downvote now….

    • https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-deaths-have-outpaced-deaths-from-pneumonia-and-flu
      ““The elderly do still make the largest portion of deaths,” Dr. Fady Youssef, a board-certified pulmonologist, internist, and critical care specialist at MemorialCare Long Beach Medical Center in Long Beach, CA, told MNT.
      “However, early on, COVID-19 did cause a much [higher] rate of deaths in younger age groups, with the sharpest rise in those aged 40 to 79 — meaning that COVID-19 posed a serious health risk to a young age group that [is] typically shielded from the worst outcomes when it comes to flu or pneumonia,” he added.
      https://www.familiesfightingflu.org/flu-deaths-vs-covid-19-deaths/
      “According to the World Health Organization, 290,000 to 650,000 people die of flu-related causes every year worldwide. COVID-19 has killed over 5 million people worldwide in just 2 years.
      But how do flu and COVID-19 deaths compare in the United States? On average in the United States, as shown in the graph below, people are less like to die from the flu than COVID-19”
      https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2514
      “Data from the Office for National Statistics show that in England and Wales the number of deaths from influenza was 1598 in 2018 and 1223 in 2019.1 This is way below the annual deaths from covid-19, which at the current rate of around 800 deaths a week in England and Wales equates to more than 40 000 a year.2
      Disagreements have emerged on social media because some commentators have quoted much higher figures for annual deaths from flu.3 The reason for the discrepancy, as highlighted by the health systems researcher Dan Goyal,4 is that flu and pneumonia deaths are often reported together, including by the ONS itself. When pneumonia deaths are included with flu, the number would be 29 516 in 2018 and 26 398 in 2019. This is obviously closer to covid death numbers, though still less, according to current trends.
      Covid mortality data have also been the subject of debate. Through the pandemic some datasets, including Public Health England’s, have included all deaths from any cause within 28 days of a positive covid test. Some sceptics have argued that this approach has overestimated the number of people dying from covid-19. But as The BMJ’s columnist David Oliver and the expert statistician David Spiegelhalter have pointed out,56 this approach has probably under-recognised the real number of deaths from covid-19, because of an initial absence of testing back in spring 2020, and because people who survived more than 28 days before dying from covid will not have been included. The ONS’s data, considered the most accurate, are based on cases where covid 19 is mentioned on death certificates. As Spiegelhalter has highlighted, 90% of death certificates where covid-19 is recorded identify it as the primary, underlying cause of death.”
      Etc.

    • Speaking if disinformation, I present Joe Biden speaking to the nation on a CNN Town Hall exactly one year ago today: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit and you’re not going to die…. You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.” – pure disinformation, question is, was it incompetence or intentional?

    • Marcelk, Biden’s claims weren’t supported by the data available at the time he said it. Both about not catching the virus and it being a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Whether he knew that or not is different issue. You are the one misrepresenting things. I’ll end with another………….”For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death — if you’re unvaccinated — for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. ” -the great divider and fear mongerer Joe Biden 12/16/21

    • VOICE – “”For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death — if you’re unvaccinated — for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. ” – nothing untrue about that. Thousands of unvaccinated around the country (and a few here in town) died this past winter.

  2. That’s absolutely true. Opinions are one thing but citing bogus websites and secondary b.s. ‘references’ are another story. Covid has brought out all kinds of sheep. I do think it’s good, no – it’s great – that we have a forum locally to give our opinions on all topics ranging from local to global. Everyone has a right to their opinion.

  3. It seems that the study avoided the question of economic status, instead using the clumsy surrogates of ‘ethnicity.’ It seems highly likely that those that are dying at such a high rate did not have diagnostic care or good health services before the ultimate death and this is almost certainly the result of lack of money. It may also be true that the least affluent in CA over the past years have done better than the next level of poor folks due to Medi-Cal coverage that has been extended to them with subsidies and outreach. Another argument for universal health care if true.

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