niman wrote:
P&I spikes higher in 4th month as elderly ratio declines.
The above is the bottom line on the El Paso deaths in the recently posted numbers by GSGS, but even those are misleading because he takes the jump, which is most dramatic for weeks 14 and 15 and turns it into a monthly number of 13.25%. But that number is represented in the tables as 1325 because the ratios are multipled by 1000 instead of 100. Similarly, the ratio of the over 65 to total isn't multipled, so the 67.7% is presented as .667 and the table is mislabeled to suggest the P&I ratios are for over 65 when they are for all ages.
However, since the CDC doesn't break down the ages of the P&I cases, there is a classic signal to noise ratio problem because most of the deaths overall are not due to P&I, so change in a smaller subset is hard to see in the larger subset. However, when the P&I went up, the ratio of over 65 deaths went down, because most of the deaths were under 65, as would be expected from a large spike in H1N1 fatalities.