Front Page Washington Post Story on Excess Deaths

Important for what it says and does not say

Below are key excerpts from this mainstream media story.  As you read these key parts of the story keep this in mind: There is no mention of the CDC VAERS data that documents many thousands of adverse COVID vaccine impacts and deaths.  Hundreds of thousands of deaths not directly resulting from the virus but from vaccines have undoubtedly occurred.

Nor has CDC dug deep into the question of how being vaccinated or not affects excess deaths.  But there are a number of comments that define some excess deaths as what are rightfully called “collateral” pandemic deaths.  Meaning deaths caused by a host of government actions that caused deaths other than from the COVID virus directly.  A very big category are the many ordinary health checks, tests, and procedures that did not take place during the pandemic.

Here are the excerpts:

The excess-deaths figure surpassed the milestone last week, reaching 1,023,916, according to Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

In 2019, before the pandemic, the CDC recorded 2.8 million deaths. But in 2020 and 2021, as the virus spread through the population, the country recorded roughly a half-million deaths each year in excess of the norm.

The CDC mortality branch’s official count of deaths from covid-19 stood at 911,145 as of Tuesday.

Anderson said 91 percent of the deaths from covid-19 tracked by his unit were attributed directly to the disease. In the other 9 percent of deaths, covid-19 was listed as a contributing factor but not the primary cause.

The CDC documented 13 other types of non-covid causes of death that were inflated during the pandemic compared with historical trends starting in 2013. For example, since the start of the pandemic, the category of ischemic heart disease has recorded an additional 30,000 deaths beyond what would be expected. Deaths from hypertensive disease were nearly 62,000 higher than expected.

Anderson said the numbers carry a degree of ambiguity: Some heart attacks and hypertensive disease could have been associated with undiagnosed cases of coronavirus infections.

The CDC’s analysis estimates 208,431 excess deaths from all the non-covid causes since the start of the pandemic. At first glance, that number plus the 911,000 covid-19 deaths would suggest the excess deaths were greater than 1.1 million. But Anderson notes that many of the people who died of covid-19 were elderly, sick or very frail, and, even without a pandemic, some might not have survived across the two-year span of the pandemic. “Some of those covid deaths are not, strictly speaking, excess deaths,” he said.

The million-deaths figure highlights the broad reach of the pandemic beyond the direct lethality of the virus itself.

“The bulk of the excess deaths were a direct result of covid-19 infections, but pandemics have major cascading impacts on all aspects of society,” said Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

He cited many health impacts beyond the coronavirus, including a sharp rise in drug overdoses as people with opioid use disorder struggled to get treatment or used drugs in isolation, and a drop in cancer screenings, such as mammograms and colonoscopies. The CDC previously reported that more than 93,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2020, a record number that far surpassed deaths from homicide and traffic accidents combined.

The CDC has found that 74 percent of covid-19 deaths occurred among people age 65 and older. Anderson noted that many elderly and frail people found themselves isolated because of precautions against viral spread. During the initial wave of infections, when the country largely shut down, the quality of care for the most vulnerable populations probably suffered, Anderson said. Deaths from Alzheimer’s disease exceeded the expected total by 66,000 during the course of two years, he said.

The country largely shut down for 45 days, with schools transitioning to remote learning, restaurants closing or going strictly to takeout, and airports turning desolate. Many people essentially sheltered in place. That set up a secondary health crisis, as people canceled cancer screenings, ignored warning signs of heart problems or possible strokes, and failed to receive the kind of medical care and support they needed.

Adalja said the excess deaths associated with the pandemic but not directly caused by the virus suggest that in a crisis such as this, the country should favor targeted rather than broad public health interventions.  [In other words, target vaccines to the most at risk and vulnerable rather than trying to get the whole population vaccinated.]

The roller-coaster trend line of excess deaths as tracked by the CDC captures the multiple waves of infection that struck the United States since early 2020. There have been five waves total. At one point last March and April, the mortality numbers came very close to returning to normal.

Steven H. Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, said Tuesday that his published studies on excess deaths during the pandemic have consistently shown that 80 to 85 percent were caused by the virus directly. The remainder can largely be attributed to disruptions caused by the pandemic, he said.  [emphasis added]

“The economic and psychological stresses of the pandemic take their toll,” Woolf said.

The United States on the whole has an unusually high rate of chronic health conditions, such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and has a long-recognized “health disadvantage” compared with other wealthy nations.

That disadvantage was exacerbated by a weak and scattershot response to the pandemic, Woolf said. Other countries that reacted more quickly or took more aggressive postures to control viral spread early on were able to limit their death toll as well as long-term economic impacts, he said.

“We did not handle it well. That’s glaringly obvious,” he said. “The other countries got hit by the same virus, but no country has experienced the number of deaths we have, and even if you adjust for population, we are among the highest in the world.”  [emphasis added]