COVID Death Toll
Was it worth it did we save lives......
If any of you can remember back to late 2019, before COVID was a thing here in America and we were just getting sound bites on the evening news, most public officials were down- playing its seriousness and saying that COVID is not a major threat (here). Then, remember early on when the experts and their computer models predicted millions of US dead and tens of millions of world dead in the first 3 months to a year (here, here, and here). While the mainstream cycle ran the horrific predictions of death and destruction, during most of the first half of 2020 there were outlets that took a more reasoned approach and tried to explain why the models were wrong (here). Fortunately, none of the worst-case scenarios played out. What did really did happen and will we ever have actual, solid numbers to really evaluate the outcome? The CDC has made it clear that only around 6% of all COVID deaths were people who died of COVID the other 96% died with COVID, not necessarily of COVID, and the vast majority were elderly and were already suffering 2.6-4 other comorbidities that were killing them (here and here). It is also interesting that with things like the flu, in reporting, they separate out the causes. sSo when you get a death number for people killed by the flu, those people just had the flu and if people had comorbidities those deaths are listed separately. If flu numbers were published like COVID numbers, the 2017-2018 flu season would have been reported to have killed around 177,000 people, but you would have to add the numbers up yourself (here). Some have claimed that all of the COVID deaths are just mis diagnosis of flu, pneumonia, and other seasonal illnesses that have all but disappeared (here, and here). While others say the flue is gone due to a natural selection type effect, where COVID is just more transmissible and therefore has driven the flue out (here). While the second explanation may be true, it also seems like a person weakened by one illness would be more susceptible to another. We see this frequently with people who go from having a cold or flu to having pneumonia. (and I personally have had the flu and strep throat at the same time, a (very bad couple of weeks.). I do realize that while I can read information presented, I do not always fully understand all the underlying science, so in those cases I try to provide multiple viewpoints so you, my readers, can decide for yourselves. At this point, we know COVID hasn’t killed millions of Americans in six months, and in the last almost two years has only killed a couple million people globally. I understand that isn’t a good thing, beyond the fact that it isn’t as bad as predicted.
I think there are questions a reasonable person needs to ask at this point to determine if the cost of stopping COVID was worth it and if further restrictions are warranted. These questions are:
How high is the actual death toll?
How accurate are the official numbers?
How many people died as a result of the restrictions?
Did giving up so many of our rights actually achieve the desired result of saving lives?
If curtailing rights is saving lives, and if it is temporary, then at what point do we get to go back to normal?
The answer to the first question isn’t as easy as it may seem. I say this because many states reported to the CDC anyone who died within a fixed number of days after having a positive COVID test as having dieds of COVID to the CDC (here, here, here, and here). To be fair, some of it was cleaned up (here and here), but can we really believe that, after months of counting, anyone who died within a fixed period after a positive test or how who tested positive at the time of death, regardless of what killed them, that the numbers have been scrubbed so clean as to be accurate? The COVID faithful point to excess mortality rates of 2020 to confirm there was indeed something going on. As we dive into excess death counts to evaluate the value of the actions our governments have taken to fight COVID, we need to first understand that no matter what the excess mortality numbers are, the CDC acknowledges roughly a third are a direct response to our government’s actions to fight COVID (here). The excess death rate is essentially deaths in excess of the projected number based off of a raw average of deaths from a fixed number of previous years (here). This method reports excess deaths at 522,368 in 2020. Based on the CDCs own observations, a third of them were a direct result of the lock downs due to suicide, in ability to get treatment, and other causes. In essence, the actions taken to save lives caused 174,123 deaths. This leaves us with roughly 348,245 more deaths than would have been expected in 2020 and roughly half as many deaths, again, caused by our response policies. Per the CDC, we know only 6% of those deaths were from COVID alone, so 20,895. The other 327,350 excess deaths had on average 2.6-4 comorbidities. If this were the flu, the death count would have been reported as 20,895 and all the others would have been counted, but broken down into categories based on comorbidities.
To get a really good handle on global excess mortality rates, Swiss Policy Research has put together an excellent report (here) and it opens up by putting COVID in perspective compared to the flu of 1918. The report shows that COVID produced a Global mortality 0.025%, while the 1918 Flu pandemic had a global mortality rate of 2.4%. As much as media likes to compare them (here, here, and here), They are not the same, and COVID isn’t even in the same category. iIt is really like comparing the damage of crashing into a peddled bicycle and that of hitting a fully loaded locomotive. The 1918 flu was seriously orders of magnitude more dangerous, and to use it as a comparison to COVID is disingenuous at best and intentionally deceitful at worst, and the media does it all the time (here). This report uses what I like to call ‘the fallacy of raw numbers’, where you can make an accurate, if meaningless, point by using raw numbers. COVID is reported to have killed as many or more people than the 1918 flu, but how many more people are there today? If you really want to know how deadly an illness is, you need to know what percentage of the population it kills. Therefore, raw numbers are not helpful. If they were being honest, they would normalize the numbers. For example, if I told you an 4 people a year die at location A and only 1 person a year dies at location B, where do you want to go? You might pick location B based on raw numbers, because they make it seem safer, until you find out there are only 10 people at location B and 1000 people at location A. Context matters.
In truth, once COVID got out, there was nothing we could do to save everyone. The real question is did we save anyone, and did we save enough people that the 174,123 people who died due to our COVID response were an acceptable sacrifice?. For this, if we compare the U.S. deaths per million of 2,107.29, where we wrecked our economy, gave up our rights, and generally became a police- state in some areas, to Sweden’s COVID mortality rate per million of 1,444.37, where they didn’t do any of the things the U.S. did, it doesn’t appear like it was worth it (here). Sweden, unlike the rest of the industrialized world, did virtually nothing from a government level to fight COVID. In Sweden, they recommended frequent hand washing, followed the science to not mask (All the science says masking increases infection rates.), and recommended people with symptoms stay home and not take mass transit (here). They didn’t do anything the rest of the world did, primarily because they actually had a response lead by the science and not by politicians. Almost two years out, the Swedes have given up no freedom, haven’t subjected their most vulnerable to isolation, haven’t mandated any medical treatments, or destroyed their economy, yet they have a lower COVID death rate than Italy, England, France, the U.S., and most of the rest of the developed world (here). If we want to look closer to home, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas were frequently in the news for their lax COVID responses. South Dakota hasn’t done anything and the other states did very little, mostly leaving it up to local communities until later, and then they all enacted anti- mask or vaccine mandate laws. How do they compare to states that imposed totally draconian lockdowns and mandates like Illinois, New Jersey, and New York? All of these places had the strictest policies and fined or arrested people for even minor violations. ? The mortality rate per 100K people in South Dakota is 242, in Oklahoma it is 226, and in Texas it is 225, with little or no disruption in daily life. The death rate per 100K in New York is 258, New Jersey is 309, and Illinois is 216. It doesn’t appear that strict lock downs had any effect on total outcomes, so far as how many died (here).
At this point I will leave it to you, my readers, to decide if the cost was worth it or if our response to the pandemic only added injury to an already bad situation. If you haven’t please read the first four letters in this series found here, here, here, and here.