Covid: The Aftermath

I have been saying for a long time that the supposed anti-covid measures undertaken by governments would do more damage in the long run than the virus. That conclusion is now emerging clearly from the data. Kevin Roche does a retrospective on Minnesota, which no doubt is typical of most, if not all, states:

What is particularly noticeable is that extra drug and alcohol deaths in younger people far outweigh supposed CV-19 deaths during the epidemic. Lockdowns kill, much more than CV-19, for this group. And the homicide increases are also attributable to CV-19 lockdowns in part.

Note that Minnesota, like other states, continues to call deaths CV-19 ones, even if it clearly had nothing to do with the death, like a homicide that happened to have a positive test within the prior 30 days.

The post consists mostly of charts, which are worth studying in detail. Causes of death are broken down by age category. I would focus particularly on two of them. First, mortality among those age 65 and up:

Older people basically die from natural causes. As you can see, the covid epidemic did add somewhat to mortality among the elderly, although not to anything like a catastrophic degree. And my own study of Minnesota’s mortality data (which are amazingly comprehensive) tells me that “covid deaths” overwhelmingly consist of old people who were already very, very sick.

Now take a look at the same data for the age group 19 to 30. Young people rarely die from covid or other diseases, but look what happened to accidental deaths in this age group in 2020 and 2021. Drug overdoses are classified as accidental:

These numbers are consistent with research done by my colleague Martha Njolomole, who found that in 2020, “individuals aged 15-24…were 40 times more likely to die from an overdose than from COVID-19.” Meanwhile, “individuals aged 25-34 were 18 times more likely to die from overdose than from COVID-19.” Overdose deaths in those age groups skyrocketed during the covid shutdowns.

In short, what we have done to our young people, in an inefficient and largely futile effort to protect the very sick elderly, is a crime. And we have barely begun to see the effects of the emotional damage to young children caused by forced mask-wearing.

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