The CDC released a report last Friday showing that for the second year in a row #COVID19 was the third leading cause of death in the US right behind heart disease (693,000) and cancer (605,000). Not only did it reach the third ranking again, the number of people who died of #COVID19 increased by a third overall from 350,831 in 2020 to 463,228 in 2021.
In 2020, #COVID19 made up 10% of all real live dead Americans, and in 2021, 13%.
If you think that is bad, then (a) CONGRATULATIONS, you’ve not been inflicted with #COVID19-fueled mass psychosis and (b) you haven’t seen the figures on excess death!
#COVID19 Deaths
Excess Deaths
Excess death is the public health term for the number of deaths from ALL causes during a crisis that are greater than the projected number of deaths without the crisis. The CDC is comparing the number of deaths that occurred during the #COVID19 pandemic to the number of deaths they would’ve projected using figures from previous years had the pandemic not occurred. Fun, right?
They do this because the figure can help us understand the impact of the crisis on the population better than just taking the number of deaths attributed to it. There are always some deaths that occur because of the crisis but for one reason or another are not attributed in the records to the crisis. In other words, some people died of #COVID19, but their deaths weren’t attributed to COVID or were indirectly caused by it like, you know, by having all the ICU beds taken up by idiots who refused to vaxx or mask and prevented people who were severely ill from other causes getting the treatment they needed.
The results of The Lancet study estimating excess deaths in the US during the pandemic (2020 & 2021): 1,130,000 real live dead Americans whose deaths probably would not have happened had it not been for the mishandling of the pandemic. That doubles our deaths. Doubled, y’all. Doubled.
MORE DEATH, SHORTER LIVES
Even without the pandemic, the US has seen some disturbing trends in its mortality rates. Once was every year saw fewer deaths and longer lives for everyone. Sure disparities existed between ethnic groups, ages, and incomes, but overall everyone was living longer healthier lives. Then, something funny happened on the way to nirvana.
Life expectancy has been falling at least since 2015. This trend is being driven by midlife (ages 45 – 54) white people with a high school education or less who are dying of drug overdoses (opioids), alcoholism, self-inflicted gunshot wounds, and accidents mainly, the so-called deaths of despair.
The pandemic has only exacerbated those trends and made turning them around much more difficult.
Reasons for Unnecessary #COVID19 Deaths
It doesn’t take an actuarial genius to see that there are literally millions of preventable deaths occurring every day in America. It doesn’t take an epidemiological genius to realize that most of those deaths are occurring among the MAGA Nation demographic: rural, poorly educated, Christian whites.
Given that the unvaccinated accounted for the bulk of the deaths from #COVID19 since the vaccines became available, it is clear that keeping up with your vaccinations and immunity from #COVID19 is the single most important thing we can do to get the pandemic under control, yet a significant percentage of our population refuses to get vaccinated or wear masks.
If exposed to these numbers, most of MAGA Nation could understand that the choices Fox News and Republican politicians have encouraged them to make during the pandemic have lead to unnecessarily painful lives and being dead way too young.
Ye Olde Blogge has covered two reasons that MAGA Nation does not seem to understand the dire peril their leaders have put them in. First is partisan coverage filtering, which is the deliberate selection of stories to steer the understanding of viewers in a predetermined political direction.
Second is mass psychosis, which is the willingness to believe any lie that helps relieve the extreme stress that your political leadership has forced you to live in through fear mongering hot button social issues like the immigrant caravans filled with Ebola carrying ISIS members coming to decapitate us all! Run for your lives! Or abortion meaning that doctors want to kill perfectly healthy carried-to-term newborns. Or that undeserving lazy Blacks and Browns are being given handouts paid for by your hard-earned tax dollars and you’re getting shut out of the American dream.
Combined these two phenomena are so powerful that MAGA Nation is, literally, willing to die for the political ambitions of Republican politicians like DeSantis, Abbott, and Noem. And, these politicians are willing to sacrifice their lives because they are on the dark tetrad personality spectrum of psychopathy, sadism, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. They just don’t care who has to die for them to become the next Trump and provide the one percent with all the wealth their greed can amass at whatever cost to the lower and middle class it means.
These stark numbers mean that we have to work towards turning the vote in 2022 and electing Democrats and independents. We have to fight to defeat the Republican attack on our democracy and on our populace. MAGA Nation is helpless in the face of the onslaught of disinformation, lies, and demagoguery coming out of the GQP. The only way to interrupt the process is to defeat the politicians at the ballot box. Failing that, we’ll have to do it in the streets through mass peaceful protest like the Ukrainians did in 2013.
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“Valdivia – The Dance” by Don Vacomano is marked with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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Categories: Cognitive Psychology
The Psy of Life 
Fifty years of Mr Natural out the window.
Not necessarily so. Not to wax all “superior” or anything like that, preacher, or even address the covid angle, guns, car crashes or heart disease, but not only am I looking at the short side of seventy but with a couple of parents still alive and a g-grandparent who lived to a hundred and five I’m looking at a lot of years (potentially) ahead of me, and the degree of comfort I spend those years highly dependent upon how I take care of myself. It is only with tongue loosely in cheek when I say “don’t want to smell like shit don’t eat it.” I think the mortality decline is more in line with those who do.
All it takes is a fairly vegetarian diet morning and noonish, and an hour or so of moderately strenuous exercise every day. Alcohol is a bad thing, a poison, and we all know it. Antibiotics, booze, chemicals, drugs, elements, gases, hormones, insecticides … you know the drill. To my experience they’re easy enough to avoid.
People are dying sooner because they’re not taking care of themselves.
That’s not my problem …
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Howdy Ten Bears!
I’m not so sure that people ever took care of themselves. The only group in the industrialized developed world that is experiencing a declining life expectancy are white middle class Americans. Everyone else is still on the increase. Most attribute it to guns, booze, tobacco, and opioids, but it could also be to exposure to toxic pollution due to the corporate America buying our regulatory agencies and to the crappy food that our industrial food companies provide full of salt, fat, sugar, and very simple carbs.
Whatever the cause, white middle class America is on the decline. #COVID19 just made it worse.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Calico Jack – Gaslit to death in MAGA Nation
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And meanwhile, we hear that the most common cause of death among people under age 18 in the US in recent years was guns. Another pandemic supported by the GOP.
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Yeah, I had thought about including that depressing development in the post. And, still the reaction from the right is, “Meh.” They have thoroughly insulated themselves from any contradictory information. It will lead to a spectacular downfall. unfortunately, one that will damage a lot of people along the way.
Huzzah!
Jack
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That downfall can’t come soon enough.
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