We’re not over the Pandemic yet (or, better said, Covid-19 isn’t done with us yet!) but it appears that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Throughout the country, facial mask and social distancing restrictions are easing as the majority of our citizens have been vaccinated and “herd immunity” is rapidly approaching.
Hooray!
It’s been a long, upsetting slog to get to where we are today. Had there been better leadership at the Federal level back in early 2020, this plague might have been squelched within that very year. However, partisans played political games, the seriousness of the situation was publicly called into question, and large numbers of people were encouraged to believe that the whole thing was a hoax or seriously overblown.
Lots of innocent people died who shouldn’t have, many trusting that their elected officials were telling them the truth. An enormous number of additional citizens suffered hospital stays, loss of work, restricted freedoms, and such. The toll on the American economy has been staggering and the labor market is forever changed. (Perhaps for the better: who knows?)
Over the two years of the pandemic, there has been a steady drumbeat of doubt and skepticism by conspiracy theorists and Trump cult followers that the number of deaths attributed to Covid-19 have consistently been inflated… for political purposes. These armchair experts loudly proclaimed that this virus was engineered by the Chinese/Democrats to mess up Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. A big to-do over nothing, they said.
According to death certificates (upon which doctors list the cause of death), more than 900,000 Americans have now died from Covid-19. Skeptics consistently say, “Bullshit, those numbers include all manner of causes of death! The real total is probably a fraction of that!”
Today, the CDC released the official mortality statistics for the past two years. Mortality statistics reveals how many people have died in the United States from any cause (including old age, cancer, heart attack, lung disease, accident, etc.). These statistics have been maintained by the government for at least one hundred years, tracking both births and deaths, allowing statisticians to project population growth estimates which are important to economists and politicians.
Local officials in all cities and counties throughout the country keep track of such things: there is no centralized Big Brother fiddling with these numbers for political purposes. If you die tomorrow, your death will be noted somewhere in your local jurisdiction. If a new baby is brought into the world, that will also be noted. Births over deaths result in population increase, and vice versa.
Anyway, the most recent mortality statistics reveal that there have been approximately 1 million extra deaths in our Nation since the pandemic began. That would be over and above the number of deaths that would have statistically occurred given the population of the Country. By the way, those million extra deaths exceed the “official” CDC estimates of death from Covid-19 by about one hundred thousand departed souls.
This is pretty convincing evidence which confirms what epidemiologists and doctors have said from the very beginning of the pandemic: the “official” tally of Covid-19 deaths, as we all moved through the pandemic, was probably undercounted. This is understandable because not all people die in hospitals (where the cause of death is determined), not all deaths are autopsied, and there were probably a lot of deaths that occurred way back in early 2020 before Covid-19 was even known to be infecting people.
After all, our own President was telling everyone, on TV, that it was “just the flu” and that it was nothing to worry about. He knew that he was lying: behind the scenes, he was mobilizing government and industry for the rapid production of a vaccine.
Not to be outdone, some “Red State” governors have purposely underreported Covid-19 infections and deaths to lend credence to the party line that the pandemic was overblown by the media and to justify a “business as usual” attitude, minimizing unpopular social distancing measures. Many people died from Covid-19 in those states because their public officials pooh-poohed the dangerous situation and some gullible people believed them.
This pandemic has turned out to be the worst public health catastrophe in United States history, surpassing the carnage of the 1918 Spanish Flu. And we’re not out of the woods yet: the latest 7-day average of Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. is approximately 2,300.
The moral of the story is, “Trust science not politicians”.