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by richbradshaw 1702 days ago
How does this compare to the overall death rates? Are LEOs an outlier here?
3 comments

If I am doing the numbers right, the overall US COVID death rate is ~2200 per 100K and LEOs are 476 from that site out of (from other sources) about 700K, which is 68 per 100K.

Which initially makes LEOs look like they are doing quite well, but I suspect its quite bad once you correct for age demographics of the population and the law enforcement profession. There aren't a lot of cops in the age groups with the highest COVID-19 death rates...

Then its a high contact profession that has been highly resistant to every control measure (to the point of actively sabotaging enforcement in many places where they were responsible for it), so its not at all surprising that they would be hard hit.

The original site doesn't seem to be a good source - Texas has 3.5x the absolute numbers of California.
Texas also has/had much more COVID than CA.

And they also probably have different policing styles.

CA had 0.06 cases per capita [since Jan 1 2021], TX is at 0.07. "LEO density" doesn't offset this enough either, so there has to be some reporting error.
Or behavioral (possibly driven by departmental policy) differences in LEO community between states. Or...lots of other things.
Across all ages COVID looks to be #2 in causes of death but #1 for ages 35-54. [1]

Note that only in 5-6% of deaths is COVID the only cause of death. CDC has data on comorbidities [2]

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid19-and-other-...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Co...

The average age of death from Covid in the US is higher than the average age of overall death. So I don’t think it applies everywhere. I think occupations that don’t encounter so many people probably have a lower death rate.