Last week I looked at excess deaths in BC over the course of the pandemic. How did the United States fare in comparison?
USMortality.com has been been tracking cumulative excess mortality in the US throughout the pandemic using CDC data. Here's what they found:
The green line is 2020. You can see that deaths were below normal in early 2020 and then steadily rose for the rest of the year. Deaths were even higher in 2021 (the blue line), and higher again still in 2022 (the red line).
In 2020, deaths were 13.6% above normal. In 2021, deaths were 16.4% above normal. So far in 2022, deaths are an incredible 21.2% above normal.
Vaccines were supposed to save lives. How is it that excess deaths rose in 2021 after vaccines became available? And by 2022, only the mild omicron variant remained - how is it that excess deaths are even higher this year?
Looking at totals we see:
29,011 deaths below normal for 2020 at the start of the pandemic (week 11, 2020)
411,592 excess deaths in all of 2020
486,033 excess deaths in all of 2021
145,813 excess deaths in 2022 up to week 11
1,072,449 total excess deaths over the first two years of the pandemic.
What would have happened if the US had had the same rate of excess deaths as BC? We can only make a ballpark estimate, but it is instructive.
BC had no excess deaths in 2020, and about 2 percent excess deaths in 2021. Two percent over the US 2021 expected 2,971,000 deaths would be about 60,000 deaths. We don't have any 2022 data yet for BC, but if we add another 2 percent for 11/52nds of a year, that would be another 12,000 excess deaths, for a total of 72,000 excess deaths in the US if the US had had the same rate of excess deaths as BC did.
In other words, if the US had had the same rate of excess deaths as BC over the course of the COVID pandemic, roughly a million fewer Americans would have died over the past two years!
How do we explain this huge discrepancy?
One might be tempted to think that BC had fewer excess deaths because BC had high vaccination rates, extensive masking, extended lockdowns and lengthy school closures. Where that argument breaks down is that quite a number of US States had anti-COVID measures at least as draconian as what was seen in BC, but had rates of excess deaths a whole lot closer to the rest of the US than to that of BC.
The pattern of excess deaths for young adults ages 25 to 44 is particularly troubling:
See the green shaded area? That's the range into which expected deaths fall about 95% of the time. The red dotted line labelled 'Substantial increase' marks the edge of anything remotely normal in excess deaths. You can see, for the entire duration of the pandemic, the excess deaths were hugely above normal. The worst period was August and September of 2021, when the death rate was almost 75 percent above normal (Week 31 through Week 39). What could have caused that?
Yes, that was near the peak of the Delta wave, but COVID should not have caused anywhere near that many deaths in the 24-44 age bracket. (We saw in my previous post that only about 2% of deaths in BC in 2021 among 19 to 39-year-olds were from COVID.) What killed all those American young adults?
I suspect the high levels of excess deaths seen in the US over the past two years had multiple causes -everything from lockdown stress to vaccine side-effects to iatrogenic deaths, to a lack of early treatment, to high levels of comorbidities, particularly obesity. Careful study will be required to tease out what part each played in the final death toll.
I sincerely hope that, once the Republicans gain control the US Senate and House, they will institute a rigorous review of what happened to cause this pattern of sky-high excess deaths in America, particularly among young people.
Excess Deaths Persist in the US
I'm amazed at how few people are aware of usmortality.com and who are blissfully ignorant of the fact that death is increasing even as covid deaths are decreasing. I check the site frequently these days to see the latest numbers, which are truly shocking. Based on the upswing in weeks 10 and 11, I expect week 12 numbers to be even worse, at a time when deaths should be dropping significantly. Unfortunately, that red line in the cumulative death chart will likely continue to diverge from last year's already high numbers.
My analysis is very consistent with yours, Bruce. Canada's excess deaths remain high (except in the 85+ demo) for reasons that are not explained publicly. I honestly am shocked that there really isn't even an attempt at a coherent explanation for what's going on. Some public health 'experts' claim Covid deaths are underreported and that explains much of the excess, but I can't find any evidence to support that claim. (That was likely true early on before we had widespread testing, but I don't imagine a single Covid death goes undetected now.)
My suspicion is that suicides are highly underreported, but I also can't find evidence to support that. (A friend who works in the funeral industry tells me suicides are a major untold story, but I haven't been able to corroborate that with publicly available data.)
We--and especially our young--deserve a coherent, comprehensive explanation. The delay in data reporting sure doesn't help -- the story is cold before a motivated journalist could even inquire.