Overdose deaths, 1999-2020

This table lists all deaths for ICD10 codes X42, X44, X62, X64, Y12, and Y14 for every county and state in the United States for 2020. These ICD10 codes are commonly used to estimate opioid-related overdose deaths determined to be accidental (X42, X44), suicide (X62, X64), or of undetermined intent (Y12, Y14). Since some of these ICD10 codes include deaths due to drugs other than opioids, the numbers below won't be exact for any given state or county - they can be under or overcounts. They're mostly useful to see change over time or compare different counties or states rather than to get an exact number.

Clicking on a county or state name will give you data for that county/state back to 1999, as well as a graph comparing the county/state to the state/whole country.

The source of the data is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Underlying Cause of Death database (available at https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html)

Where the number of deaths is listed as 'Supressed' it means there were between 0 and 9 deaths in that county. In locations with so few deaths Congress became concerned that the identity of the people who died might be guessed by people familiar with the county, and in 2006 required the CDC to stop making exact numbers publicly available where less than 10 deaths occured from a given cause.

The Crude Rate is the number of deaths per 100,000 people in the county (a common tool to allow you to compare counties where one county has a large population and another has a small population. The bigger the number, the worse the problem).

The Age Adjusted Rate is the number of deaths per 100,000 people statistically adjusted for the age distribution of the population of the county (counties with lots of elderly people might normally see more deaths due to falls, for example, so to make county-to-county comparisons it is common to adjust for the age distribution so you don't think one county has a much bigger problem with falls than another when it's just there's more elderly people in one county than another).

Where "Unreliable" appears beside a rate, it means the county has a relatively small population and/or the number of deaths is relatively small, so one death more or one death less would make a big difference to the rate, making it less useful as a way to compare with other counties or to compare changes from year to year in the same county.

Comments and suggestions to make this more useful (or the explanations above more coherent) are welcome. Peter Davidson: pdavidson at ucsd dot edu.