The Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) has started reporting fatalities from COVID-19 in Texas differently than it had in two ways. First, it now reports from stated cause of death on the death certificate. Second, it now counts a fatality for a date on the actual date of the fatality rather than counting a fatality on the day the report of that fatality reached DSHS.
Because death certificates are slower to be issued and slower to reach DSHS than the speculations that were being used before, reported data at the DSHS for the last week or more has to be presumed low because many death certificates for that time have not yet reached DSHS, yet.
So, here is a rolling 7 day daily death chart for COVID-19 in Texas through July 24, 2020.
I still maintain that these numbers are larger than actual because we have heard so many stories about mis-classification of death even on the death certificate. We know there is a financial incentive to list COVID-19 as a cause of death on the death certificate and you get more of what you pay for.
But despite all that, it appears that we are over the hump in Texas, heading in the right direction. Let the debate over the cause of that begin.
( Click here to link to the source of this chart on the Texas DSHS site. See the “Case and Fatality Trends” tab.
The other good news is that the “Fatalities Demographics” tab on the same Texas DSHS website is now being updated again. The posting had stopped back in mid-May. But the updated stats show about the same trends as back then.
There still is not a single child under 10 who has been reported to have died by COVID-19 through today, August 3, 2020. And only 7 children between 10 and 19 are reported to have died.
That means that the risk from COVID-19 is virtually zero for children to return to school.
And, the elderly continue to be the most at risk, with 32% of those classified as having died of COVID-19 being over 80 and 70% being 65 or over.