By Paul Ricci Much has been made of the clash between Gov. Josh Shapiro and HHS secretary Robert Kennedy Jr with Kennedy disputing the 2 measles deaths in the state. The state maintains a dashboard showing the measles outbreak numbers in the Pennsylvania. I will now look at what these numbers are saying. The image […]

by Paul Ricci Watching Dr. Anthony Fauci get grilled by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee brought back a lot of memories of the struggles of the pandemic. The committee is chaired by Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). He is a trained ophthalmologist. Senator Paul is now pursuing contempt of Congress charges against Fauci after he […]

The 2025 County Health Rankings are out. Their current health model is in the video above. This may be the last time that the rankings are released. This is due to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s decision to discontinue funding. For this post, I will focus on pandemic life expectancies for race in the Alleghenies. […]

While looking at the numbers for Johnstown and Altoona in the last post, I looked at the county health rankings for Blair County. To my surprise the life expectancy for African-Americans there (65.1 years) was close to that for Cambria County (63.7 years). This is despite Blair County having a relatively high overall heath ranking […]

Group 2016-2018 2017-2019 2018-2020 2019-2021 Overall 75.8 76.1 75.8 74.9 White 76.2 76.4 76.1 75.3 AfricanAmerican 65.6 67.3 66.9 63.7 Life Expectancy by Race in Cambria County Two weeks ago I posted on the rise in mortality in the African American community in Cambria County during the pandemic. The table above shows the decline in […]

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 […]

I thought I would post an update of the PA COVID pandemic numbers since Pennsylvania and Johns-Hopkins have taken their dashboards down in March for the former and in May for the latter. Above is the trend in weekly COVID deaths for Pennsylvania according to the CDC. County level data is no longer publicly available. […]

I spoke too soon last week when I was touting the low numbers of COVID deaths in Pennsylvania (a total of 6 in the last 2 weeks). This week 96 were reported. It could have been due to a reporting glitch. Taking the last 3 weeks together, there were and average of 34 deaths over […]

The news on the COVID-19 front for Pennsylvania has been encouraging as of late. The number of deaths statewide has decreased dramatically. Five weeks ago there were 104 deaths from COVID-19 in the state. Four weeks ago there were 86. Three weeks ago there were 53. Two weeks ago there were 43. Last week there […]

Last week I posted on the health outcomes rankings and COVID mortality in the area. This week I’m taking a look at health factors from County Health Rankings and COVID Mortality from the PA Department of Health. The above graph shows a significant linear trend in the overall health factors ranking and COVID mortality accounting […]