The new study provides the most compelling data yet to suggest that excess mortality rates from chronic illnesses and other natural causes were actually driven by COVID-19 infections.

For the study, Stokes, Paglino, and colleagues utilized novel statistical methods to analyze monthly data on natural-cause deaths and reported COVID-19 deaths for 3,127 counties over the first 30 months of the pandemic, from March 2020 to August 2022. They estimated that 1.2 million excess natural-cause deaths occurred in US counties during this time period, and found that roughly 163,000 of these deaths did not have COVID-19 listed at all on the death certificates.

Now if we could get an estimate of how much chronic illness covid is causing...