The Cost Of lock downs in Human lives

A month ago, rant team member Gary brought to my attention new data from the CDC that showed only 6% of Covid deaths in the US had no comorbidities.  That would seem to indicate that we can only say for certain that 6% of the 150,000 plus Covid deaths (the data was only complete until the end of July) in the US were caused by Covid.  The rest of the deaths could have been dying with Covid rather than dying from Covid.  We have certainly seen this in Canada where BC and Alberta did not have a covid peak or anything outside of normal.  Canada had a coivd peak, but it is much too small to account for the official covid deaths.  In Canada Dying with Covid is more common than Dying from Covid.  After what I had seen in the Canadian numbers, I assumed that I would find fewer excess deaths than the official US covid total.  In Canada people who would have died anyway were added to the count to make it look scary.  It was not the lack of parachute that killed that sky diver it was the covid.  I was able to find the total deaths in the US and to my surprise I found that the US had a covid peak that accounts for all the Covid deaths.  The number of excess deaths was so close the official Covid death total that it looked like the CDC was carefully watching the numbers and classifying anything above normal as Covid.  It looked like they were cooking the books.  Still the deaths were real, something caused them, right?  I did not know what to do with the data, so I set it aside for a month to think about it.

I went back to the data a few days ago and updated my numbers.  Now the data is complete to mid-August when the US official US deaths were 185,000.  I checked the excess deaths and found that the CDC was still carefully matching the excess deaths to the covid total.  I was only able to find 3 years of back data, but it was very consistent and gave me a good average.  The plot below shows total deaths by week for 2020 compared to the average of 2017 to 2019.

Contrary to what the corrupt media would like you to believe the US was one of the first countries to impose restrictions.  Deaths started to peak right after complete lock downs were initiated in Mid-March (week 11).  Then when deaths started to peak in the southern states in about week 25 restrictions were re-imposed in many places.  All these excess deaths occurred when the US was under lockdown.

Next, I looked at the comorbidities from the CDC. 

The first thing to note is how incredible ill these people were.  The 185,619 people who died during this period had a combined 528,068 comorbidities.  That is almost 3 per person.  That is what made this so confusing in the first place.  Which one of their 3 serious health problems caused their death?  Because these are truly excess deaths the CDC has taken the position that it must be Covid because that is the new complication, without it these people would be alive. 

Like most things the lunatic left says this makes sense until you think about it for a minute (or in this case a month).  I have two problems with this explanation

1. Some of the comorbidities are deadly on their own.  22,949 people suffered cardiac arrest and 16,349 had kidney failure.  If your heart or kidneys stop working you have way bigger problems than Covid.
2. We know from anecdotal evidence that some people have died because to the lockdowns.  To say that all the deaths were due to Covid ignores those deaths.  It also ignores the 6,152 people on the list above who died of accidental poisoning, injuries, and intentional harm.  How the hell does suicide become a comorbidity?  He shot himself but the real cause of death was the covid infection he did not even know he had?

Covid was not the only new factor.  The lockdowns are new and occurring simultaneously with Covid.  How many deaths are due to the lockdown and not the virus?  The CDC and other medical agencies have touted the lockdowns as an important mitigation tool, so they are more than a little reluctant to blame the lockdown for any deaths.  To them the lockdowns were a medical intervention.  Once again, the CDC is ignoring reality.  Medical intervention is often deadly.  250,000 people die every year in the US from medical errors.

To answer the question of how deadly the lockdown might be I looked at non covid related deaths.  I was able to find on The CDC website deaths from all causes categorized in major categories.  If there were more heart attacks simply because people with weak hearts could not stand the stress of Covid then I should see the same number or even fewer heart attacks with people who were not infected with Covid.  The same should go for all the other comorbidities on the list.  Unfortunately, the data base I found only had 2019 and 2020 so all I can do is compare with last year.  What I found was that in 2020 the US had significantly more deaths in some of the major categories than in 2019.  Remember these are for deaths unrelated to Covid.  Some of the biggest increases are below.

There were some very significant increases over 2019.  These 5 groups also happen to be the most common comorbidities for covid fatalities; over 50% of the comorbidities fall in to these 5 groups when you count all the various heart conditions listed in the comorbidity table.  Maybe 2019 was just a low year; I don’t know since I have no data from other years.  I might have thought that this was not out of the ordinary until I looked at the timing of these deaths.  I Grouped them all together except influenza; influenza is viral disease while the others are not, so I left it out.  Below is a plot showing the difference from 2020 to 2019 on a weekly basis.  When the number is positive 2020 had more deaths that week than 2019 on the same week.  When the number is negative there were more deaths in 2019 for that week.  See the plot below.

Don’t you find the shape to be very familiar?  Take another look at the first plot that shows excess deaths due to covid.  Covid deaths peaked in weeks 15 and 29 when the Covid lockdown restrictions peaked.  Deaths for people who had the same conditions but did not have covid also peaked in weeks 15 and 29 when the covid lockdown restrictions peak.  Deaths due to heart attacks, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and strokes peaked with the restrictions whether or not the patient had Covid.  It was the lockdown that caused these excess deaths not covid; covid was just along for the ride.  We have suspected all along that we would see deaths due to restricting health care to people who were managing long term health conditions and this is the smoking gun.  The lockdown kills.  We should suspect that some of the covid deaths would not have happened if it were not for the rationing of health care.  How many of those Covid victims put off seeing a doctor for their Diabetes not realizing that they also had Covid?

You cannot show that the lockdown saved a single life, but you can show that the lockdown negatively impacted millions of lives.  We will never know the complete cost in terms of human lives that the lockdowns caused but this plot would indicate that number is in the 10s if not 100s of thousands.  The people responsible for the lockdowns will forever block a full accounting of their sins, and these are huge sins.  How is this not mass murder?  War criminals have received the death penalty for less.  The only way to hold these people to account is to throw out the politicians responsible for this tragedy in the next election.  Then we must insist that the new people clean house.  We need to root out all the incompetent, corrupt bureaucracy that helped make this happen.