Alabama just had its worst week ever for new reported coronavirus deaths, and it wasn’t even close.
The Alabama Department of Public Health reported more 829 deaths this week - more than doubling the previous record of 384 set the week before Christmas.
The state reported at least 100 deaths in one day four times this week, including an all-time high of 226 deaths reported on Jan. 12. That’s the only time Alabama has ever seen more than 200 deaths added in a day.
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The state crossed the 5,000 death mark on Jan. 7. It took 289 days to reach that grim milestone. Now, just eight days later, the state has topped 6,000 deaths. And the latest surge in reported deaths makes previous highs seen throughout the pandemic seem small by comparison.
The state’s 7-day average for reported deaths skyrocketed this week - up to a record high of 124 cases per day on Jan. 14 - a 460 percent increase in reported deaths in less than 10 days. The new record was more than double the previous high, set on Dec. 24.
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But many of these newly reported deaths happened earlier - and it’s difficult to know exactly where we are currently in terms of virus deaths.
Late last year ADPH began the process of counting “a large number” of old deaths, which entered their system via the Alabama Center for Health Statistics - which ADPH runs. This process has resulted in old deaths entering the system at a much higher rate over the past few months, and especially in the last week.
As of Friday, Jan. 15, the average death reported over the last seven days was more than 110 days old, according to date-of-death data from ADPH analyzed by the independent COVID-19 tracking website BamaTracker.
Of the 839 deaths reported this week, only 35 are actually confirmed to have occurred since last Saturday.
But that doesn’t mean people aren’t currently dying due to the coronavirus - only that those new deaths haven’t entered the state’s system yet. An analysis of hospitalizations and date-of-death data by BamaTracker shows how deaths were highest in Alabama when hospitalizations were high.
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The state’s 7-day average for new cases has now fallen for five consecutive days, plummeting by more than 960 cases per day during that time.
As of Friday it stood at 3,320 new cases per day - the lowest it’s been so far in 2021, though still significantly higher than the state had seen at any time prior to the start of December.
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The state also continues its efforts at distributing the two COVID-19 vaccines. ADPH announced Monday it had vaccinated around 42,000 more people, bringing the total at that time up to 87,138.
Related: How to sign up for a COVID-19 vaccine in each Alabama county
But the state is far behind the rest of the country in terms of vaccination rates - the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed Alabama was dead last in the nation.
See how many reported cases and deaths your county added this week in the table below:
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Do you have an idea for a data story about Alabama? Email Ramsey Archibald at rarchibald@al.com, and follow him on Twitter @RamseyArchibald. Read more Alabama data stories here.