Visualizing 500,000 Deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S.
Right. Take every one of those visualizations. Now more than double them. That's deaths from heart disease and cancer, which we will have with us, year in year out long after this pandemic.
But those illnesses will have been exacerbated by the unemployment, despair and unhealthy inactivity that we are living under now.
Most of the dead have been Americans 65 and over.
But the youngest people in that cohort had a life expectancy of 69.6 years at birth. Those who died at 70 last year had already outrun the reaper.
Taking nothing away from the gravity of the suffering and loss that accompanies all human mortality — these deaths are normal.
What we are doing to our entire society out of the fear of death, is abnormal and maladaptive.
Lockdowns/shutdowns are killing people too. For some reason journalists aren't as obsessed with counting that. From where I sit the harm from the "cure" is far more widespread and grim than the disease.
I think the point is that many (most?) of those deaths could have been avoided had we had competent political leadership that would have better responded to the pandemic.
Canada for example has about a tenth of our population but has had “only” 22k COVID deaths.