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Report: Data From Funeral Homes Can Serve as an Early Warning Sign of Health Emergencies [1]
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Date: 2025-03-18
A new study has found that rural county health officials can use information from funeral homes and obituaries to identify community health emergencies.
The study, published in the Journal of Appalachian Health, looked at public funeral and obituary listings to identify spikes in excess mortality. What Dr. Randy Wykoff, East Tennessee State University’s Dean of Public Health, and his team found was that information from those sources can serve as an “early warning sign” to public health emergencies in rural communities.
“If I was still a local health officer, I would simply count the newspaper obituaries every month and create an ‘expected’ number of deaths, for each month,” Wykoff said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “Then, in the unfortunate circumstance that there were more deaths than expected, I would know, in a matter of one month, that these deaths had occurred and then look into why.”
Looking at state health department records, funeral-home listings, and local newspaper obituaries in Washington County, Tennessee, between 2017 and 2019, researchers were able to predict the number of deaths by month for 2020. Calculating the excess number of deaths over and above the amount expected gave researchers insight into when Covid-19 deaths actually started to show up in that county.
Researchers found that there were twice as many excess deaths in the county compared to the official number of deaths attributed to Covid. Although the first official Covid death wasn’t recorded until early summer, the data showed excess deaths in the county much earlier, Wykoff said.
“(The) other thing that was quite surprising was that the first official Covid death in Washington County was in early July, and yet, we had had almost 100 excess deaths by that point,” he said. “Had someone been doing this in real-time, they would have said, ‘My gosh, in February, March, April, we really were already seeing excess deaths from Covid in Washington County.’”
Dr. Megan Quinn, lead researcher on the report, said the discrepancy could have been caused by a number of Covid-related reasons – medical personnel not diagnosing Covid, patients not being tested for Covid, or patients dying from other things after their initial Covid diagnosis, or people delaying care. But having the excess death information, she said, would have provided county health officials with critical information about what was going on in their communities.
“I think one of the things that’s so valuable with this, as with any piece of data, is that we can use it to understand our communities better,” she told the Daily Yonder. “This is just one way of looking at an early warning signal of what might be going on that we may not be seeing through other data mechanisms, and although it’s a kind of unique and different way of looking at things… it’s important, especially given the delays in data.”
Using the publicly available data can reveal excess deaths much faster than official statistics, the researchers said. For example, death data from state sources was not available until October of the following year, the researchers found. Although obituaries and funeral home notices don’t give specific causes of death in some cases, health officials can still use them to note unexpected increases.
“It’s just an early warning system that something is going on,” Wykoff said. “If you’re camping out in the woods, and you put a string with a bunch of tin cans on it, and you hear the cans rattling, you’re not sure what’s out there but you know there’s something, right? That’s the same thought here.”
Wykoff said county health officials can create a historical month-by-month registry of the number of deaths in their region and use that information to assess if there is an early indication something in their area has changed.
The researchers said they will be using the same methodology to identify excess deaths that will occur over the next few years as a result of the long-term impacts of Hurricane Helene.
For Wykoff, the data is an important yet inexpensive way for county health officials to save lives.
“I believe that it should be one of the most important articles I have published in my career,” he said.
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[1] Url:
http://dailyyonder.com/report-data-from-funeral-homes-can-serve-as-early-an-warning-sign-of-health-emergencies/2025/03/18/
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