VSRR Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts

Counts for the most recent final annual data are provided for comparison. National provisional counts include deaths occurring within the 50 states and the District of Columbia as of the date specified and may not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period.

Provisional counts are often incomplete and causes of death may be pending investigation resulting in an underestimate relative to final counts. To address this, methods were developed to adjust provisional counts for reporting delays by generating a set of predicted provisional counts. Several data quality metrics, including the percent completeness in overall death reporting, percentage of deaths with cause of death pending further investigation, and the percentage of drug overdose deaths with specific drugs or drug classes reported are included to aid in interpretation of provisional data as these measures are related to the accuracy of provisional counts.