MUST READ!-----|Death and Lockdowns

Death and Lockdowns

• There’s no proof that lockdowns save lives but plenty of evidence that they end them.

"Now that the 2020 figures have been properly tallied, there’s still no convincing evidence that strict lockdowns reduced the death toll from Covid-19.

 But one effect is clear: more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities, and the less affluent.

The best gauge of the pandemic’s impact is what statisticians call “excess mortality,” which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. 

That measure rose among older Americans because of Covid-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths were not attributed to the virus.

Some of those deaths could be undetected Covid-19 cases, and some could be unrelated to the pandemic or the lockdowns. 

But preliminary reports point to some obvious lockdown-related factors. 

• There was a sharp decline in visits to emergency rooms and an increase in fatal heart attacks due to failure to receive prompt treatment. 
• Many fewer people were screened for cancer. 
• 
  Social isolation contributed to excess deaths from dementia and Alzheimer’s.
• Researchers predicted that the social and economic upheaval would lead to tens of thousands of “deaths of despair” from drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. 
• As unemployment surged and mental-health and substance-abuse treatment programs were interrupted, the reported levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts increased dramatically, as did alcohol sales and fatal drug overdoses. 
• The number of people killed last year in motor-vehicle accidents in the United States rose to the highest level in more than a decade, even though Americans did significantly less driving than in 2019.

...Whatever the direction of the errors, there were clearly many excess deaths not caused by the virus. The CDC counted about 345,000 deaths last year in which Covid-19 was the “underlying cause.” 

...Given that the total number of excess deaths, by the CDC’s calculation, was about 510,000 last year, that leaves more than 130,000 excess deaths from other causes.

How many of those 130,000 people in America were killed by lockdowns? 

No one knows, but the number is surely large, and the toll will keep growing this year and beyond. Those deaths won’t make many headlines, and the media won’t feature them in charts like the ones comparing the coronavirus death toll to past wars. 

But these needless deaths are the greatest scandal of the pandemic...Must read all!!