PolicyMap Severe COVID-19 Health Risk Index
| Details | Risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms |
|---|---|
| Topics | Public health, COVID-19, coronavirus |
| Source | PolicyMap |
| Years Available | 2020 |
| Geographies | County, tract, ZCTA |
| Public Edition or Subscriber-only | Public Edition |
| Download Available | yes |
| For more information | https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/18/us/coronavirus-underlying-conditions.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage |
| Last updated on PolicyMap | May 2020 |
Description:
PolicyMap worked with journalists at the New York Times to create this index assessing a county’s relative risk of its population developing severe COVID-19 symptoms. The index represents the relative risk for a high proportion of residents in each county to develop serious health complications from COVID-19 because of underlying health conditions identified by the CDC as contributing to a person’s risk of developing severe symptoms from the virus. These conditions include COPD, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.
Estimates of COPD, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes and obesity prevalence at the tract and ZCTA level are from PolicyMap’s Health Outcome Estimates. Estimates of diabetes and obesity prevalence at the county level are from the CDC’s U.S. Diabetes Surveillance System.
The raw score represents a sum of the estimated number of people ever diagnosed with each health condition. The normalized index represents a sum of the share of the adult population ever diagnosed with each health condition. Normalized scores can be used to compare risk between areas with different populations. The raw and normalized indices should not be interpreted as a true representation of the number or percentage of people affected by the five conditions, since these shares are not mutually exlusive; those diagnosed with two or more conditions count two or more times.
Normalized scores were then converted to percentiles and z scores for easier interpretation. Percentiles rank counties from the lowest score to the highest on a scale of 0 to 100, where a score of 50 represents the median value. A county’s z score shows how many standard deviations above or below the average a county’s risk level falls. A score of 0.6, for example, would mean that the county has a higher risk than average, but is still within one standard deviation of the average and is therefore not unusually high. Risk categories from very low to very high are assigned based on z scores.