TY - JOUR AU - Parker, John James AU - Octaria, Rany AU - Smith, Miranda AU - Chao, Samantha AU - Davis, Mary Beth AU - Goodson, Celia AU - Warkentin, Jon AU - Werner, Denise AU - Fill, Mary-Margaret T1 - Characteristics, Comorbidities, and Data Gaps for Coronavirus Disease Deaths, Tennessee, USA T2 - Emerging Infectious Disease journal PY - 2021 VL - 27 IS - 10 SP - 2521 SN - 1080-6059 AB - As of March 2021, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) had led to >500,000 deaths in the United States, and the state of Tennessee had the fifth highest number of cases per capita. We reviewed the Tennessee Department of Health COVID-19 surveillance and chart-abstraction data during March 15‒August 15, 2020. Patients who died from COVID-19 were more likely to be older, male, and Black and to have underlying conditions (hereafter comorbidities) than case-patients who survived. We found 30.4% of surviving case-patients and 20.3% of deceased patients had no comorbidity information recorded. Chart-abstraction captured a higher proportion of deceased case-patients with >1 comorbidity (96.3%) compared with standard surveillance deaths (79.0%). Chart-abstraction detected higher rates of each comorbidity except for diabetes, which had similar rates among standard surveillance and chart-abstraction. Investing in public health data collection infrastructure will be beneficial for the COVID-19 pandemic and future disease outbreaks. KW - coronavirus disease KW - COVID-19 KW - severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 KW - SARS-CoV-2 KW - coronaviruses KW - viruses KW - respiratory infections KW - ethnic groups KW - comorbidities KW - underlying conditions KW - mortality rates KW - epidemiology KW - population characteristics KW - public health surveillance KW - Black patients KW - White patients KW - Hispanic patients KW - zoonoses KW - Tennessee KW - United States DO - 10.3201/eid2710.211070 UR - https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/10/21-1070_article ER - End of Reference