Last week County Health Rankings came out with their 2024 rankings. The graph below shows mortality trends for Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. The numbers for 2020 are an average for the years 2019-2021. Two out of the three years (2020 and 2021) are years at the height of the COVID pandemic. The rankings are based on the myriad of statistics during this period. The new County Health Rankings show how the COVID pandemic impacted the area.
The chart above shows and increase in the mortality rate as years of potential life lost (YPLL) before age 75. For example, if someone dies at age 25 then they have 50 years of potential life lost. There was a rise in mortality from 2017 to 2020 for Cambria County, Pennsylvania and the U.S. Over this period, there was a 2.43% rise in Cambria County, a 6.07% rise in Pennsylvania, and a 15.94% rise in the U.S. Mortality was already high for Cambria County in 2017. For the 10 county region that I looked at for COVID mortality, 7 of the counties had larger increases in overall mortality than Cambria ranging from 6.07% to 21.82%. Only Huntingdon and Westmoreland Counties had decreases over this period.
| County | Mortality (YPLL) | % Change | |
| 2017 | 2020 | ||
| Bedford | 7,622 | 9,285 | 21.82 |
| Blair | 8,290 | 9,311 | 12.32 |
| Cambria | 10,187 | 10,434 | 2.43 |
| Centre | 3,913 | 4,449 | 13.70 |
| Clearfield | 7,656 | 8,903 | 16.28 |
| Fayette | 10,467 | 11,771 | 12.45 |
| Huntingdon | 7,938 | 7,482 | -5.74 |
| Indiana | 7,989 | 9,313 | 16.57 |
| Somerset | 7,806 | 8,901 | 14.03 |
| Westmoreland | 8,421 | 8,349 | -0.86 |
| Pennsylvania | 7,573 | 8,032 | 6.07 |
| U.S. | 6,900 | 8,000 | 15.94 |
The County Health Rankings show that the surrounding counties to Cambria have had a wide range of changes during COVID. This is a morass of statistics to tease apart. Next I will look at COVID’s racial/ethnic disparities and possible reasons for them. It’s possible that not all of the increase in mortality is due to COVID mortality.