> "The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319."
So last year more covid deaths (particularly among the elderly), but while those numbers have declined, the numbers from younger "working age" people have increased more than enough to make up for it.
> "Just 8.9% of ICU beds are available at hospitals in the state, a low for the year, and lower than at any time during the pandemic. But the majority of ICU beds are not taken up by COVID-19 patients – just 37% are, while 54% of the ICU beds are being occupied by people with other illnesses or conditions."
Well a lot of people were avoiding medical care (precisely because of Covid concerns), so this makes some sense. Couple that with the increased death rate for younger people and something has happened to worsen the health and outcomes generally for that population. Cue wild speculation and theories.
Within my brothers circle of friends / former friends etc, amongst those that participate in recreational drug use, there have been a crazy number of Fentanyl related deaths. They're all between the ages of 25 - 30. I can't help but wonder how much this has an impact.
All of the non-COVID deaths I’ve heard of among younger people (<60) from my extended social circle and their family/friends have been drug related.
Working from home can remove a lot of the accountability that keeps addicts in check. When your coworkers can’t see you, it’s much easier to be inebriated or otherwise suffering from addiction-related issues without feeling social pressure to correct it.
> Working from home can remove a lot of the accountability that keeps addicts in check.
COVID countermeasures reduced the number of safe recreational activities, and was a horrible for mental health overall. Additionally, America offers very little support for mental health distress, so I imagine this triple threat has been devastating to drug addicts. I'm only guessing as a teetotaler who got addicted to video games and Twitter in that time (and I used to scoff at Twitter-addicts since I had a small, curated list of accounts I followed)
[edit]A fourth factor - drug overdoses (and other "less serious" medical issues) also got less medical care because it was being hogged by respiratory patients.
> Working from home can remove a lot of the accountability that keeps addicts in check.
This is a cruel twist, given that suicide deaths actually decreased in 2020[1], probably for the reason you've mentioned: spending nearly all of your time with others makes you accountable and removes opportunities for self-harm.
spending nearly all of your time with others makes you accountable and removes opportunities for self-harm.
Never would have seen it coming that encouraging people to stay isolated for years at a time and actively fearing their own proximity to one another would be detrimental.
I think you mis-read my comment. The irony is that people are actually closer than ever to their family (or house-mates) due to COVID, which is pushing suicide rates down.
I did not mis-read your comment, it was a continuation of the commentary on how mandated WFH and government-enforced isolation has essentially just moved deaths from column A to column B over the long run.
people are actually closer than ever to their family (or house-mates) due to COVID
Yes, this is the perception for many people who have family or housemates. In the same way the rich have gotten richer, the socially connected have become more socially connected, while the millions who already struggled with disconnection or loneliness have become even more strained at the behest of numerous politicians who mandate their "rules for thee and not for me" under the new anxiety-laced normal.
I don't want to pretend that I understand this but I remember learning in a hunting safety class that legal hunting does not actually reduce the animal population because the number of animals that will die is a fixed number and if we stay within our limits then no more will die off from hunting than would have died from other causes.
I'm not sure how your comment is relevant to the above thread, but I like it and I would like to add on to it.
There was a study done looking at the impact of wolves, deer, hunters, and traffic accidents. What they found was that the smell of wolves scared off deer - thus reducing deer related traffic accidents; wolves were more effective at this than hunters killing deer.
This is a round about way of corroborating your fact, but from a different point of view.
Don’t blame this on capitalism; this is a fact of nature. That humans have cobbled together a wealthy civilization capable of actually attempting to provide some measure of care for the weak is a staggering miracle.
> … capable of actually attempting to provide some measure of care for the weak is a staggering miracle.
We’re capable of doing far more to care for people than we do. The amount that we do is practically nothing in the US.
Europe seems to do a reasonably good job. Apologies if you were posting from a more socially sofisticated state. I kind of assumed and I usually try not to do that.
>people are actually closer than ever to their family
Domestic abuse is really high now - because of all of the "close familyness" going on. Also, there is a "National Emergency" for pediatric mental health. [0]. This is not a trivial fact
I’m not a native speaker, but there seems to be something inappropriately judgmental about the wording of “keeping in check”. Loneliness is hard for many and causes suffering, and drugs are sometimes used to try to manage suffering. More use is linked to more accidents.
I can see the judgemental interpretation, but I don't think that's what the GP intended. I read it as "most people suffering from addiction benefit from accountability, one form of which is the in-person responsibilities of work."
It's not judgemental - it just is. Many addicts in recovery themselves use similar language. I spend a lot of time with recovering addicts and alcoholics and accountability is an important component of treatment.
> Working from home can remove a lot of the accountability that keeps addicts in check.
Not only that but the lockdowns making people low-key depressed which would also be a reason for using addictive substances since they often go hand-in-hand together.
I could be pretty much classified an alcoholic during most of 2019-2020 because a six-pack a day keeps the boredom away.
I just realized that I was not a real alcoholic when I stopped drinking altogether without any withdrawal symptoms or anything like that. But yeah, it's a slippery slope for sure.
IIRC, on average it takes a month or two of having alcohol every day to start getting physiologically addicted (but - like most of biology - it can be faster or slower).
For anyone reading who thinks that may apply to them: Talk to your doctor. "Cold Turkey" alcohol withdrawals can kill.
Maybe you didn’t fit the addiction part of aloholism, but when it comes to consumption, a 6-pack a day definitely puts you in that category, along with associated psysical and psychological risks. I’d definitely mention that level of alcohol consumption to my GP and get all relevant blood tests
That's pretty normal, at least for the last few decades of American life. There is not a major natural cause of death for people 18-65. They die of suicide, accidental overdoses, and car crashes.
When we say "overdoses", doesn't it sound like the person's fault, when it was probably that they were sold a poisoned/cut batch? I wonder how many "overdoses" would have been avoided if you could buy drugs at a pharmacy.
A lot of times an overdose occurs if a person got clean for a while then went back to using. They tend to start using at their previous levels even though their body is no longer used to that level, so it's a sudden jolt that kills them. So I've read - I have zero experience with drugs, luckily.
Yeah, I've read that too, but I have no idea which is more frequent. I'd assume the tainted drugs are more frequent, just because getting tainted product is more frequent than getting clean and relapsing, but I don't know.
I'll definitely recommend LSD or mushrooms, though. They are lots of fun.
Coincidentally all the natural cause deaths in my circle were “natural” diseases like cancer and COVID-19. I’m in my 30s now, and no longer really hang out with (non-functional) drug addicts anymore though. YMMV.
US has had both a drug-addiction epidemic, a diabetes epidemic and an obesity epidemic.
Each these conditions doesn't just reduce lifespan. They also put people in a more fragile life-situation where they need more support. And the US hasn't been at maintaining those kinds of support during the epidemic.
Edit: The US life expectancy decline relative to other advanced nations is relevant. Take a look at the following chart in detail. US life expectancy was set back twenty years. No other nation was set by more than ten years.
And makes people more vulnerable when they contract other diseases. COVID hits harder if you are diabetic and/or obese, for example. The people who try to promote body positivity are doing a disservice to the overweight. You cannot be healthy and fat, and we should not pretend otherwise to spare hurt feelings.
Body Positivity movement started out with a good goal, but went off the rails with the obesity == healthy BS.
However if you want to solve obesity, especially the morbid obesity shamming will never resolve that as chances are the obesity is cased by an underlying metal or medical issue. most often an anxiety disorder of some kind, and socially shaming someone that suffers from anxiety is not going to cure them, and in fact will most likely make their eating disorder worse.
The primary cause of obesity — in my experience, as a midwesterner — is a lack of access to affordable, healthy food. What people can afford (in terms of money/time/opportunity cost) is primarily overprocessed garbage. It’s mostly impossible to maintain a healthy weight in such an environment.
Yes, I’m aware of the twinkie diet guy. Most people aren’t the twinkie diet guy.
I don't buy that. The vast majority of people would save substantial money by eating better--either by cutting out fast food or by avoiding junk food.
Convenience/time is a big issue, but its not like the upscale versions of fast food are really that better for you.
It's a cultural thing. Nobody eating a big mac for dinner every night would switch to kale salad from Whole Foods if they got a raise. America never had a good food culture and what little we even had was based on stay-at-home wife.
Money isn't the reason why lower class Hispanic and Asian areas can support grocers with quality produce, but white lower class areas don't.
Half my families "recipes" originated on mass produced canned/boxed food labels. My grandmas chicken and rice dish calls for cambells and uncle bens. Regardless, I love it anyway.
Most Midwesterners have access to cheap, healthy food like frozen chicken, canned vegetables, potatoes, apples, and eggs. Especially if they get on SNAP (food stamps). The real problems are more cultural. A single large soda or a few cookies can contain more calories than a whole meal.
In my experience as a Midwesterner, that also has traveled to almost every states in the union, there is no problems with access to affordable healthy food in the Midwest, Large cities have more of this problem than the Midwest, Meijer, Kroger, Walmart, etc are full of healthy affordable food. In fact in many instances the junk processed food mid-westerners buy are MORE EXPENSIVE than the fresh produce
Also my experience as a Midwesterner, is the people of the Midwest enjoy sugary beverages far too much (I say that as someone that should be drinking water but instead am enjoying a glass of very sweet tea). I would say if the average Midwesterner cut out 60% of the sugary drinks the obesity problem would take a big hit.
So I disagree that we in the Midwest lack access to affordable, healthy food
>What people can afford (in terms of money/time/opportunity cost) is primarily overprocessed garbage.
I've heard that, but I'm not necessarily sure it's true.
All of the lower socio-economic areas I've lived in (in Melbourne, may be different in the US) have had an amazing selection of dirt-cheap fruit, vegetables, dried legumes and fish that are easily accessible in the main shopping area.
Often we're talking "cash only" businesses that avoid tax in order to lower the prices further, and they're always offering a ridiculous deal on in-season produce. We're talking, in AUD, $5/kg for fish, $2/kg for vegetables, $1/kg for fruit. The dried stuff doesn't go on special, but it's usually dirt cheap anyway ($15 for a 5kg bag, once you rehydrate it you get something like 20kg of chickpeas or lentils).
Lack of access to these markets is something I miss now that I'm no longer so close to Dandy/Sunshine.
Rice and beans are cheap everywhere. It’s our culture that is the problem. Look at immigrants who come here, they are often healthy when they stick to their ethnic traditional food but as soon as they start eating an “American” diet they gain weight. American food is very indulgent. We even feed kids shitty over-processed food in schools. In contrast, most of Europe feeds its students locally sourced and fresh food for much cheaper. America is on the dark side of capitalism where profit motive drives everything to excess.
> You cannot be healthy and fat, and we should not pretend otherwise to spare hurt feelings.
I think I’d say more that you can’t be morbidly obese and healthy. Fat people can be healthy (just probably less likely to be healthy than someone at a “typical” weight.
Too bad this podcast’s website is crap for linking to specific episodes. Check the ep from a few weeks ago: Is Being Fat Bad For You?
You also cannot be healthy and dead from COVID-19. Everyone preaching healthy eating instead of vaccination during the pandemic is doing a disservice to humanity.
And it's not just opiate users. People buying coke & 'molly' are overdosing too from fent and analogues too.
Why in the world would a dealer put fent into coke. I guess a speedball feels great but the average weekend partier doing a bump or a pill are not looking to walk that death tightrope.
Just sad all around and we still have a long way to go with stigma and science based treatment.
If you happen to be in that scene might be a good idea to start carrying naloxone.
I know there were a few people organizing on reddit too where they would ship it if you can't access it easily too! I think it was a lady on /r/opiates
Yep. It's not an opioid epidemic or crisis, it's a toxic drug crisis. The drugs are poisoned. No one knows what's in them.
There's a drug test site in my city that regularly posts examples of what they find on twitter. Totally random ultra dangerous poisons in party drugs. All the time.
I'm sure the coroners reports are complete and accurate, but the way this has been portrayed in the media is as "overdoses" and hand waved as an opioid issue. The reality is more complex and the issue is beyond opioids.
Yes these are "overdoses" but when the contents of the drug is not truly what the drug user is told, the drug user has no way to know what the safe dose is of the drug they are using.
Drug use has become a game of russian roulette as no one has any knowledge of what is in the drugs and there's no real safe dosage.
Government data does not say that. The CDC recorded 100k drug overdose deaths in 2020[1], ~75% of which were from opioids. They don't have a breakdown of how many of those 75k opioid deaths were fentanyl, but it's an order of magnitude below just the confirmed number of COVID-19 deaths in 2020[2].
Edit: The reporting in this article is remarkably bad: it confuses a two-year range (Jan-2020 to Dec-2021) with a one-year range, and itself contains a number that's nowhere near the number of COVID deaths:
> The drug has taken just shy of 80,000 people's lives between January 2020 and December 2021.
I agree the report makes its point poorly and phrases statistics carelessly, but you made a similar mistake: they explicitly state it exceeds COVID deaths over ages 18-45.
All these media reports were all influenced by this underlying factsheet from FAF.
Broadly, it appears true: fentanyl deaths look like they outweigh all those things in the younger population. And it doesn't look implausible that synthetic opioids could have killed a total of 64k across the entire population in 2021. (I think they were comparing trailing-twelve-month data from two dates in each case..)
edit, 3mins: I was distracted and my previous version of this reply was word salad.
Thanks for linking the factsheet. These deaths are a useless tragedy, and it frustrates me to see them framed against another useless tragedy.
The CDC's death count with age breakdowns[1] shows that over twice as many people aged 18-64 died of COVID-19 than drug overdoes, combined across 2020 and 2021. That flips when you limit it to just 18-45, which is the statistic FAF is using.
Anchoring like that is a problem when it's used to dismiss something: "Eh, more people die from fentanyl, so X isn't so bad".
Which disregards that X may be a new source of increased deaths, not to mention that when X == COVID, the methods needed to mitigate the risk are antithetical to a mindset of "it's no big deal" because that mindset pushes back against taking even some minimal precuations.
So, anchoring can help people understand the magnitude of something, but at the same time convey a misunderstanding, or short-circuit reasoning as well.
This is precisely why it is a common sales tactic: Go into a jewelry store asking for a nice watch as a present, and you may be shown a $3k watch. Way over your budget, so when you ask to be shown a something else a $700 watch seems like a much better deal, even if it might still be a bit more than you wanted to spend. Maybe the third watch will be an ugly one for $400 to help convince you that you need to spend more, putting both an upper & lower bound on the purchase.
> Which disregards that X may be a new source of increased deaths, not to mention that when X == COVID, the methods needed to mitigate the risk are antithetical to a mindset of "it's no big deal" because that mindset pushes back against taking even some minimal precuations.
I don't think anyone has said, "fentanyl is worse for 18-44, therefore COVID is no big deal".
I think the message taken was "two sources of premature death shot way up, passing traffic accidents and suicide, which we all know are really bad in that age group". And maybe "wow, fentanyl is even bigger than COVID as a cause of death among young adults".
It doesn't make me take traffic safety less seriously, either.
Look, I ain't got time each year to compute loss-of-life expectancy numbers, and decide how preventable each and every cause is, and then come up with an analytical ranking of each cause and its "importance" (I did this at one point, but I'm not going to repeat it to understand trends).
I don't work in public health, either. Approximation based on reasonable anchor points and understood risks is just fine.
I don't think anyone has said, "fentanyl is worse for 18-44, therefore COVID is no big deal".
My intent was to make a general statement about anchoring as a technique. But in any case, you're incorrect: my own father has made this sort of remark about opioids, and I've seen it pop up in message boards, and with other (not necessarily opioid) comparisons by folks who resist masks/social distancing/vaccination.
I've never heard the "no big deal" one. I've heard another: If responses to COVID have worsened the opioid crisis, that's a cost that should be counted against COVID mitigation measures.
(I still think this is faulty: I don't think responses to COVID have done much to change the opioid crisis. But at least this is a rational argument and open to debate).
Different social/family circles maybe? (And my own-- not always healthy-- habit of reading comments on political news site... I've mostly backed away from that for my own mental sanity) But I've seen the "no big deal" thing a fair bit. I remember one exchange nearly verbatim "Fentanyl kills more people but all the fearmongering media wants to talk about is a virus that gives you a cold".
Heck, at the very beginning people saying that sort of thing by comparison to the flu. That line of thinking went away when deaths far exceeded annual flu deaths, but with the (possible) decrease in severe cases with Omicron I've seen hints of this argument again.
> but with the (possible) decrease in severe cases with Omicron I've seen hints of this argument again.
Well, at some point, it's a reasonable argument. Risk isn't going to go to 0. It looks like with vaccination my personal risk is 2-3x influenza, but I may be overstating it.
At some point, we're going to just have to give up and assume risks. I'm not routinely wearing masks 3 years from now.
I hope it does end up being true of Omicron, a bit too soon to tell though. It's a little early to tell: We're a month on from the end of November when Omicron really hit our radar and it took a few more weeks to see the really big spike we're in right now. On the national (US) level I don't see much of an uptick in deaths yet (although my own state has a bit of one) but deaths are also a lagging indicator so it may be another month before we can really tell for sure.
Another confounding variable are testing rates: Mandatory testing is in place to a significant degree more than last year, so it is difficult to tell how many more positive tests this year are simply due to mandatory testing. For example, they're required for air travel and about 3x more people traveled this year for the holidays. This is speculation though: Relevant data would be at least in part include asymptomatic case rates from year to year, but I couldn't find a good source for that. Information like [0] are very promising but still indicate that it's too early to tell.
>At some point, we're going to just have to give up and assume risks. I'm not routinely wearing masks 3 years from now.
Mostly agreed, though as variants come & go I won't be surprised if some variants create "mask seasons" as they rise & fall. In retrospect even pre-covid it seems odd that it was deemed acceptable to go into work when you were sick with a cold or flu-- not necessarily even for severe health risks, but just as a matter of common courtesy. Of course changing that behavior in the long term would also require society (again, I'm in the US) to rethink things like what constitutes a reasonable amount of paid sick time. That is an especially problematic area when workplaces mandate 5/10/14 days of isolation but don't cover it with paid leave. My workplace does not cover that time if an employee is already out of paid sick leave. In the past, when going in to work when you were sick was somewhat optional, that made a little more sense. Now, telling someone they're losing 4% of their annual income due to a mandatory 14 day isolation period w/o pay is... I'm not sure I have a good word for it, but it feels wrong.
But there needs to be a discussion if that short cuircuit is our behavior in light of this. Of course the number could be higher if we didn't react, but I would guess destroying the basis of living for so many people is also quite significant and another "new" thing.
And if this sales tactic would be applied to any security issue you can more or less forget about civil liberties.
>"Eh, more people die from fentanyl, so X isn't so bad"
The increase in deaths is being driven by lockdown/social isolation so it looks more like medical triage. Who do you save, upperclass/baby boomers who generally don't have these problems or disenfranchised young?
They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started.
>- The degree to which fentanyl is lacing other street drugs is unprecedented and seemingly independent of lockdown.
There was precedent before 2019. Seemingly independent growth that's also parabolic during 2020? Unlikely
>- Look, we don't really have "lockdown" anymore.
The genie is out of the bottle once people relapse. Maybe you don't realize how dependent recovering addicts are on rehab programs and social connections to stay clean. For some people giving them a steady unemployment income and forcing them to isolate is basically a death sentence. This was a predicted outcome during the start of the isolation.
>They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started.
Visualizing the trend, the cause is debatable: extrapolating from the trend that was in place as of March 2020 [0] leads to a similar place we're at now, and we can't know if that would otherwise have levelled off. There was a sharper uptick in April/May, but not a significant variation from the smoother curve that would have fit previous data.
>The genie is out of the bottle once people relapse.
You would still expect there to be a noticeable decline: Fewer people starting down the addiction pipeline to begin with, more people that are already addicts starting to get the help they need again. There should be a noticeable decline as people reconnect to support services, and we haven't seen that yet. Maybe it's just too early to tell, but social awareness of the opioid crisis was at an all-time high in 2019/early-2020, Rx access to them was already severely limited for the previous few years, and in mid-2019 a trend that had been pretty flat for ~2 years started to significantly increase. I'm sure COVID didn't help, but there was significant upwards pressure before that and disentangling the two is not a straightforward task.
>Who do you save, upperclass/baby boomers who generally don't have these problems or disenfranchised young?
I guess we know the answer to that, not that anyone in the latter group had any doubt before we ran the experiment.
I think it's valuable to have a reference point, and I've done that myself in my comments. The frustration comes not from the comparison or reference, but as a framing designed to excuse irresponsible behavior during the ongoing pandemic.
>it frustrates me to see them framed against another useless tragedy.
The framing is relevant since the increase is arguably a product of the lockdown/social isolation. Generally it's not Boomers or the upperclass who are having to deal with opiate addiction. Is it a coincidence that their needs once again supersede the needs of others? Maybe
Funny use of the word 'synthetic' to add extra spookiness. Something like 60% of first-world medicines are natural origin or secondary metabolites of natural origin - the other 40% are all synthetic. [1]
I wondered this myself, since they usually spell out "synthetic opioid" when referring to fentanyl and its ilk, ostensibly to compare it against naturally derived opioids. I have no idea how many in use today are naturally derived; maybe "synthetic" was always a scare term on that context?
The only two opioids naturally found in the poppy that are also used in medicine are codeine and morphine. All others are semi-synthetic (chemical modifications of poppy alkaloids) or fully synthetic. Even most codeine is made by methylating morphine, since the poppy under-produces it relative to medical demand.
"Synthetic opioid" is used to describe an opioid not derived from the morphine in the opium poppy (or the codeine in the dried poppy)
I am not a doctor: Of the very powerful "powder" drugs heroin is the safest as it has very little effect on the involuntary respiratory system which is the route that opiates take to kill. "Nodding off" on synthetic opiates leads commonly to death (which is why you always prod a sleeping junky - wake up!!) but not so much on heroin.
But it is much safer to smoke opium, if you wish to have such a habit. Much less chance of death and disease.
So, you cruel, nay, sadistic lawmakers: Legalise opium!
But people popping pills are nearly invisible and die quietly - people smoking opium fill up establishments, make funny smells and do not conveniently die off in the corner.....
Note that semi-synthetic is a category too that "synthetic opioid" generally excludes.
Natural opioids: codeine, morphine.
Semi-synthetic opioids: heroin, hydromorphone, hydrocodone, oxycodone, etc.
Synthetic opioids: methadone (though this is usually excluded from the reporting of "synthetic opioid overdose deaths" for various reasons), demerol, fentanyl, lots of -fentanyl analogs, etc.
Here it's reasonable to differentiate between natural opioids, semi-synthetic opioids, and fully synthetic opioids. It's not a perfect measure, but the degree of potency tends to vary with the category and the fully synthetic opioids do not rely upon poppies for precursors.
In general, "synthetic" drugs are more of a menace due to the ease of transportation and production. They don't have to be produced in specific geographic regions and can be very powerful, which adds up to dangerous combination.
>“ The synthetic and highly addictive drug has claimed more lives than COVID-19, auto crashes, gun violence, cancer and suicide in the year 2020.”
To be clear, this is false. Fentanyl overdoses (according to that article) have killed about 80,000 people in a year in the US whereas COVID-19 has killed more than 386,000. It's nowhere close. And that is not to mention all of the people COVID-19 has permanently disabled.
I know the article has some quantifiers elsewhere that could be used to form a true statement if included. But as stated, that is false and it's being used to mislead people into think COVID-19 isn't that serious.
> The article appears to attribute all accidental poisoning to fentanyl. That seems like an error.
I don't think it does. Sure, they throw out the 100k overdoses number at the end, which isn't specific to fentanyl, but the other numbers they cite are around 40k/year and a run rate of 64k/year by Deceber 2021.
It's about 62k deaths from synthetic opioids/year (excluding methadone) at the end of the series-- the vast majority of these are fentanyl. Plus a bunch of heroin deaths which are rapidly becoming "really fentanyl" deaths. And that's up to April, not December.
That data is for all ages. If you go to WISQARS and filter for ages 18-45, which is the subject of the news site's article, it looks to me like the numbers they are giving in the article are the same as the total number of accidental poisoning.
Topic 1 is on ages 18-45: more deaths from fentanyl than from...
The later topics are on all ages.
The fact sheet attributes 24k deaths in the age range to fentanyl in 2019. WISQARS accidental injuries from poisoning in the age range were 38k in 2019. 2/3rds in that age range being fentanyl is totally plausible.
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D157;jsessioni... has the broken down data. They have 36,907 deaths in 2020 from 18-45 with T40.4-- "other synthetic opioids excluding methadone". FAF is calling all deaths from synthetic opioids fentanyl, which isn't quite true but it's very likely close to true.
But those died due to illegal drugs won't be elligible for insurance claim. It is strange the article only showing 40% increase in deaths. I would like to see the breakdown. Is it mostly due to heart-related deaths like stroke or cardiac arrest? How many of them has been vaccinated? How many due to natural and unnaturql causes. What I have heard was some deaths due to cardiac arrests in young people. And these are routinely classified as "natural". I like to see numbers backing that. We know vaccine caused heart inflammations and deaths. What we don't see is numbers refuting that and strange for our pharma to wait 75 years to disclose their findings. Do they need to edit the reports that already submitted to FDA?
At least the people you know are rational enough to admit it.
A tangential relative died a couple of months ago from a drug overdose. Her immediate family tells everyone she died from the COVID vaccine.
Apparently now it's a thing among families who can't come to grips with a drug death to blame the new vaccines. I wonder if this is where the conspiracy theorists get their ammunition.
It's strange that this article doesn't actually mention the number of deaths for each year. They only mention the 40% increase for the younger demographic and the source says "the increase in deaths represents huge, huge numbers".
Let's assume deaths for older people haven't changed so the increase is entirely among the younger group.
x: younger
y: older
1.4x + y = 1350
x + y = 1319
0.4x = 31
x = 77.5 (younger 2020)
1.4x = 108.5 (younger 2021)
y = 1241.5 (older 2020 and 20201)
So assuming no increase in non-COVID deaths in the older group, we have 77.5 deaths in 2020 and 108.5 deaths in 2021 in the younger demographic. The actual numbers would be even lower since there have obviously been deaths in the older population.
Unless I am embarrassingly wrong on the calculation, these figures don't make sense. The source says this 40% increase figure is based on his life insurance customers who are “primarily working-age people 18 to 64”. This being just among his policy holders could explain the tiny absolute figures in the younger group. But where are the numbers for the older group coming from? His statement doesn't exclude the possibility of policies for ages < 18 and > 64. But if that's a small fraction of their customer base, it would imply a huge death rate for the older policy holders.
These numbers seem very fishy. Even if his older members are dying at astronomical rates and his numbers are correct, this is about as far from a representative sample as you could get and cannot be extrapolated to the general population. And I assume that's what the source means when he says "the increase in deaths represents huge, huge numbers."
By the way, I am not implying that there hasn't been an increase in non-COVID deaths among the young and old in these last two years. We know that's the because there is actually real data on this that the article could have included.
It could be due to random perturbations in the small data size. Like if 10 people died last year, and 14 people died this year, deaths are up 40%, but the 4 extra deaths could be random. You'd have to look at a long trend to infer meaning from such small data. But I'm not sure how big the data is in this case.
Something similar happened in my town when I saw a huge-looking spike in a graph of covid deaths. But when I looked closer, deaths had spiked from 0 to 3 on a particular day, and the average is 0.3/day. So that crazy looking spike is probably meaningless over a longer time window.
Changes in death rates directly relate to relative vaccination rates. Vaccination was initially rolled out to the elderly they where also more willing to get vaccinated. It’s strange to think that 75 year olds grew up in a time period where several horrific diseases disappeared due to vaccination efforts. It it’s clear they have a lot more faith in vaccination.
There is uncertainty in many areas of life, but this seems like one thing we don’t have to speculate about. We will not only have definitive data [1] within a couple years, but also annual [2] and weekly [3] provisional data much sooner.
Without knowing anything else, I seriously doubt that is statistically significant.
The normal pre-COVID ICU bed occupancy rate was somewhere near 57-82% (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/). 54% is quite low. I suspect that the bar for getting into an ICU bed has been raised by the number of COVID patients.
Well a lot of people were avoiding medical care (precisely because of Covid concerns), so this makes some sense. Couple that with the increased death rate for younger people and something has happened to worsen the health and outcomes generally for that population. Cue wild speculation and theories.
Not sure how your first two sentences above aren't speculation. It's like you're preemptively attack all the other speculation as "wild".
So last year more covid deaths (particularly among the elderly), but while those numbers have declined, the numbers from younger "working age" people have increased more than enough to make up for it.
> "Just 8.9% of ICU beds are available at hospitals in the state, a low for the year, and lower than at any time during the pandemic. But the majority of ICU beds are not taken up by COVID-19 patients – just 37% are, while 54% of the ICU beds are being occupied by people with other illnesses or conditions."
Well a lot of people were avoiding medical care (precisely because of Covid concerns), so this makes some sense. Couple that with the increased death rate for younger people and something has happened to worsen the health and outcomes generally for that population. Cue wild speculation and theories.