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New Analysis Reveals Many Excess Deaths Attributed to Natural Causes Are Actually Uncounted COVID-19 Deaths
(www.bu.edu)
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...
Maybe.
Maybe not for my mom. The relief she found with my grandma’s death certificate was/is, I believe, a trauma response to not being able to interact with her mother for the last few months of her life. My mom visited grandma in memory care facilities four or five times a week for many years. The last year was very difficult as my grandma’s mind atrophied more and more. She’d become violent during one visit and childlike during another. It was hard on mom. Then lockdown came and she couldn’t visit grandma.
Video calls with my mom were confusing and stressful for my grandma. Window visits too. Masked visits most of all. To my mom, lockdown seemed to hasten the dementia. And she probably wasn’t wrong. On the breadth 2021 grandma died. “Complications from pneumonia” or something like that on the death certificate. COVID took away my grandma from my mom. Not necessarily via infection, but certainly by the response to COVID in the first year of the pandemic. I think my mom wanted some solace. Or proof that even a pandemic could not keep her from seeing her mother. To wrestle some control back from the thing that took her mother away.
I’m sure there are many stories like this from early in the pandemic. Nowadays people cannot understand how someone can die of COVID without being ventilated in a crowded hospital like in the early days.