Covid Is Now Saving Lives

More specifically, fewer people are now dying than would have been the case had there been no Wuhan epidemic. As one doctor colorfully put it, the people who die from covid are generally those who had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. I have spent some time studying covid death certificates (i.e., certificates that have the word “covid” somewhere on them), and I agree: when you look at the conditions from which most covid victims suffered, it seems remarkable that they were still alive.

What this means is that most of those who have died with covid on their death certificates would have passed away before long in any event. There were, indeed, a significant number of excess deaths over demographic predictions in the U.S. in 2020. But it seems that absent covid, most of those people would have died some months, or perhaps a year or two, later. If that hypothesis is correct, we should see a lower than demographically predicted death rate over the next year or two.

And, in fact, that is what is happening. This chart, showing total mortality in the U.S., is from the CDC web site. It shows that during 2020, a larger number of Americans than predicted died. It also shows that the mortality rate is currently plummeting, and we have entered the zone where total deaths are fewer than they would normally be. So in a sense, those Wuhan deaths are now being made up:

It is too bad when a severely ailing 85-year-old doesn’t live to be 86. But the fact that we have devastated the lives of our young people over the Wuhan epidemic is a crime.

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