I am Professor of Sociology at Duke University. (→ Read a short biosketch.)
Recent Work
Recent Writing
National Weekly Death Rates
26 September 2020
Following up on yesterday’s post on within-state variation in deaths in the United States, here’s a quick look at all-cause mortality rates across twenty countries, courtesy of the excellent work of the demographers who maintain the Human Mortality Database. The panels show death rates across twenty countries. Within each panel you can compare the overall death rate for the first thirty weeks of 2020 (shown in red) with the death rates for each of the previous five years (shown in gray).
US Excess Mortality
24 September 2020 Update I’ve redrawn the graphs here to add more information about COVID-19 deaths specifically. This post is getting a substantial amount of traffic and some of the feedback I’ve gotten suggests people were confused about what exactly was being shown. The original graphs were drawn from this CDC dataset, which led some readers to think that there was some undercounting happening. In the new versions, I’ve used a merged version of the 2014-2018 data and the ongoing 2019-2020 counts.Dataviz Interview
14 September 2020I had a very nice chat recently about data visualization with Brian Fannin, a research actuary with the CAS. We covered a variety of topics from R and ggplot in particular, to how to think about data visualization in general, and what the dataviz community is learning from COVID. You can watch it here: