CFSA Suspends Quarterly “Estimated Deaths” Reports

We have suspended for the time being the issuance of these quarterly reports: Estimated Deaths, Estimated Casketed Deaths.  The most recent of these two published reports, through September 2016, were published in our November 2016 CFSA Newsletter and are currently made available for review and download in the member-only section of our CFSAA.org website.

For decades, CFSA has issued these one-of-a-kind quarterly reports, based in part on a proprietary program and formula that significantly relied on a key report we would regularly receive from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) entitled the 122 Cities Report.  The CDC would track weekly reported deaths in the 122 highest-population cities in the U.S.  The CFSA custom program would factor in this fresh, new data as it ran formulas and calculations leading to the two “estimated” quarterly reports noted above.

Unfortunately, the CDC discontinued the 122 Cities Report last fall, replacing it with a now-regional U.S. report of recent deaths.  Since our custom-built CFSA software program entirely relied on that critical and timely cities-based report, the program now cannot generate valuable and reliable estimates.

CFSA Executive Director George Buckley said, “Unfortunately, the Q3 reports from 2016 are the last ones we’ll publish, at least for now.  We need to evaluate whether to modify and update our custom program to pull the new regional data, and that would be a complex and costly project.  For the time being, we will just continue to publish the Actual State Deaths report that we also receive from the CDC. We will update our CFSA members as we get new information.”