KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Missouri reached a milestone this week, surpassing 1,000 deaths from COVID-19 based on analysis and synthesis of reports from state and local health departments.
The first death reported in Missouri from COVID-19 was announced March 18, so it took a little more than three months for the public health crisis wrought by the pandemic to reach 1,001 dead Missourians.
But that can also be a hard number to put into context.
Few would argue that violent crime and traffic deaths aren’t significant public health hazards in Missouri as well as Kansas.
Missouri consistently ranks in the top five U.S. states for the highest annual homicide rate per capita, while Kansas ranked 24th in the nation with 5.9 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Both states also consistently have more deaths per 10,000 motor vehicles and more deaths per 100,000,000 vehicle miles than the national average, according to the National Safety Council’s annual Injury Facts reports.
The pandemic has proven more lethal, even with stay-at-home orders and other social restrictions designed to limit the spread of COVID-19.
According to data from the Missouri State Highway Patrol, there haven’t been more than 1,000 traffic-related deaths in the state since 2006.
There were an average of 870 deaths on Missouri roads during the last 13 years, from 2007 through 2019.
The number of traffic-related deaths in the state has dropped each of the last three years.
During the last five years, the Missouri State Highway Patrol reports an average of 526 homicides annually, a number that has steadily increased since 2014 in the state.
Fortunately, or perhaps alarmingly if the rate of new infections continues to climb, Missouri and Kansas have escaped the worst COVID-19’s wrath compared to other states, ranking in the bottom half nationally in deaths per capita so far.
Kansas reported its first death related to COVID-19 on March 12. The total has ballooned to 262 in barely three months.
For context, there have been fewer than 127 homicides in Kansas on average for the last decade data is available, from 2009 to 2018, according to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.
There were nearly 420 traffic-related deaths each year over a 17-year span from 2002 to 2018, including 403 in the most recent year for which data was available, based on analysis of annual Kansas Department of Transportation crash statistics reports.
That averages out to roughly 105 deaths every three months on Kansas roads since the beginning of 2002 — or roughly 40% the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the state in only three months.
