I've lost a sil, a bil, and 4 uncles in the past several months, all not covid except one, who was elderly and had chf.
my point was merely that we were going to loose a certain number of people to death no matter what...heart attacks, strokes, cancer, etc...
so we didn't loose so many people to heart attacks, strokes and cancer during the covid era.....why?....why haven't we lost so many to heart attacks, strokes, or cancer...why have those deaths been fewer?....truth is, they haven't been fewer, but covid, just like a case of cdiff, or mrsa or ecoli will certainly push these sickly people over the edge....
so when this year ends, I think our number of deaths as a nation will be right around what it usually is....that is my only point...
But, [you] are too stupid to manage [your] own risks.
Democrats say so.
Plus, [your] mismanagement impacts [other] people (taxes!).
It’s for the children.
Democrats say so.
Fair enough. But I think it’s a little more complicated than that. Certainly there were deaths that were going to occur anyway which were classified as COVID when it was found the person tested positive. But there are a lot that don’t fall into that category. And beyond that, the points I mentioned in my last post make the situation even more complicated.
The quarantine itself likely saved a number of lives from causes that had nothing to do with COVID (e.g. other infectious diseases, violent crime, etc.). So I would not be surprised if we saw a net decrease in deaths for the year. That doesn’t mean the quarantine was the right approach. There are other, less tangible costs that need to be considered, such as quality of life, economic hardship, etc.
Just to follow up on my previous post, I found this article which sheds more light on the situation:
The main takeaway from the article comes from this paragraph:
“According to the [CDC] report published on Friday, 299,028 more people died from January 1, 2020, through October 3, 2020, than they expected at the beginning of the year.”
So within that 9 month time period, the number of deaths exceeded what normal trends would have predicted - by approx. 300,000 deaths. It would be hard to come up with a simple explanation for this increase at this point. There are obviously more COVID deaths this year than in previous years, because COVID didn’t exist in previous years. Some of the COVID deaths replaced deaths by other causes that would have occurred this year anyway, and some didn’t. On top of that, the quarantine itself undoubtedly had a significant impact on the number of deaths due to other causes. For some causes of death there would have been and increase (e.g. suicide), and for others there would have been a decrease (e.g. traffic fatalities). Whether the quarantine itself caused a net increase or decrease in deaths from causes other than COVID is unclear at this time.