Thursday, October 27, 2016

Heat Related Deaths

Question
(1)I am helping a graduate student who is looking for a very precise dataset which will probably require a custom tab.

She is looking for the daily number of heat-related deaths (I know there is a category for that in the Vital Statistics database) for the following dates:

· 10th-13th of July 2005,
· 15th of July to 2nd of August 2006
· 17th to 25th of July 2011

For the following areas:
· Montreal CMA
· Toronto CMA
· Province of Quebec
· Ontario
· All of Canada

The data should be broken down by:
· Sex
· Age

(1 - Revised) After talking to the researcher, she has reformulated her request hoping that data could be provided at a less granular level.

So, now, she would be is looking for the daily number of heat-related deaths (I know there is a category for that in the Vital Statistics database) for the following dates:

· July 2005
· July 2011

For the following areas:
​Montreal CMA
Province of Quebec

Answer
(1)Unfortunately the custom tab as requested is not feasible, please see response below from the Health Statistics production team:

This request is not feasible as specified. While there is no minimum for suppression in Deaths custom tabulations, the data has to be randomly rounded by 5 to abide to our confidentiality rules. In this particular case, the number of deaths linked to the ICD-10 codes provided is lower than 10, which would translate into meaningless strings of 0, 5 and 10 if we should go on with the request as specified.


(1 - Revised) From subject matter: The sample is still too small to provide any usable data. The number of deaths due to exposure to natural heat (X30) for the entire province is usually less than 10 a year. Which makes monthly data essentially random. The number of deaths due to artificial heat (Flames, fire and smoke-X00-X09) is closer to 50 annually. But monthly data is still essentially random numbers. It is even more so for the CMA of Montreal. We would not recommend to process this request considering the low numbers and the necessary random rounding.