Two years since a state of emergency was declared in Massachusetts, the state is changing how it counts who has died as a result of COVID-19 to more accurately reflect which deaths were caused by the disease. The change will reduce the state's death total from nearly 23,000 deaths to about 19,300.
The new method, which public health officials announced Thursday, aims to eliminate deaths from other causes in patients who happened to test positive for the coronavirus. The change will go into effect on Monday and will be used going forward, as well as in the state's retroactive count of COVID-19 deaths.
Initially, anyone who tested positive for the virus and later died was counted as a COVID-19 death. That method was updated in April 2021 to include any death that occurred within 60 days of a COVID-19 diagnosis, as well as any death deemed by a case investigator or listed on a death certificate as having been caused by the disease.
The new methodology reduces the amount of time between a COVID-19 diagnosis and a death to 30 days.
"We think that this is an absolutely critical step in improving our understanding of who COVID has impacted most significantly during the pandemic," state epidemiologist Dr. Catherine Brown said in a press briefing. "We believe that this will provide us a much more accurate picture of who has died associated with a COVID infection in Massachusetts, and it will also improve our ability to compare our data with data from other jurisdictions, other states."
The change is in line with updated guidance from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, which oversees this kind of surveillance methodology.
Brown said the change will not significantly affect the distribution of deaths by age, gender and race or ethnicity.
"It does not alter our understanding of who has died from COVID and where the most disproportionate impacts have been," she said.
The state identified 4,081 deaths that were previously considered to be COVID-19–related, which will no longer counted. At the same time, Brown said they identified 400 new deaths as a result of a more sophisticated algorithm for matching data from death certificates and COVID-19 case surveillance.
In combination, those changes brought the new state total of deaths to roughly 19,300.
