Measuring the completeness of death registration in 2844 Chinese counties in 2018

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Death registration completeness has never been assessed at the county level in China. Such analyses would provide critical intelligence to monitor the performance of the vital registration system and yield adjustment factors to correct death registration data, thereby increasing their policy utility. METHODS: We estimated the completeness of death registration for 31 provinces and 2844 counties of China in 2018 based on death data from the China Cause of Death Reporting System (CDRS) by using the empirical completeness method. We computed the root mean square difference (RMSD) of county-level completeness compared with provincial-level completeness to study intra-provincial varia..