b'242021 CARES Annual Report Incidence & Demographics2021 Dataset and Incidence of OHCA Events This report describes CARES data from the most recent calendar year, January 1 to December 31, 2021. CARES requires that an EMS Agency enter at least one complete calendar year of data and meet a patient lost to follow-up threshold of less than 1% to be included in the Annual National Report. The CARES 2021 National Reports can be viewed at: https://mycares.net/sitepages/reports2021.jsp. Descriptive statistics in this report are presented as frequencies or proportions for categorical variables, and median and interquartile ranges for continuous variables. Comparison of proportions were conducted using the chi-square test. The 2021 dataset includes 1,944 EMS Agencies and 2,194 Hospitals, and represents a population of 159.2 million, approximately 48% of the U.S. population. In 2021, 146,924 OHCA events were reported to CARES. The crude incidence of non-traumatic, worked arrests was 92.3 per 100,000, slightly higher than the incidence rate of 88.8 per 100,000 observed in 2020, and significantly greater than the average incidence rate observed pre-COVID (approximately 75 per 100,000). Using 2020 census data to extrapolate to the U.S. population9, CARES estimates that there were approximately 305,800 EMS-treated, non-traumatic OHCAs in the United States last year.Demographics In 2021, CARES patients were predominately male (62.5%). Of the reported OHCA events, 97.6% (n=143,284) were adults and 2.4% (n=3,606) were children, 18 years and younger. The median age of OHCA patients was 64.0 years (mean: 62.0; SD: 19.1). The age distribution varied significantly across the sexes (Figure 2), with females having a higher median age of arrest (66.0 vs 63.0 years, p.0001).Figure 2. Age distribution of OHCA events. 9Annual Estimates of the Resident Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2020 Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division.'