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The COVID catastrophe

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How many excess deaths has the COVID epidemic caused in the USA so far this year? Assuming, quite plausibly, that essentially all excess deaths in the country in 2020 are either direct or indirect products of the epidemic, the CDC gives a current figure of between 139,910 and 192,414.

That figure is going to go way up soon: essentially all of the excess deaths from the last two weeks, when COVID fatalities started shooting up again, aren’t yet reflected in the weekly excess death statistics, which generally feature a several-week lag. Given current trend lines, death totals from COVID and its associated effects could well exceed 300,000 Americans by election day.

The ten leading causes of death in the USA in 2018 (the most recent year for which complete stats are available):

Heart Disease: 655,381

Cancer: 599,274

Unintentional Injury: 167,127

Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease: 159,486

Stroke: 147,810

Alzheimer’s Disease: 122,019

Diabetes: 84,946

Flu and Pneumonia: 59,120

Nephritis: 51,386

Suicide: 48,344

The only good thing to be said about all this is that, if not for the pandemic, the Smart Take of the reactionary centrists who still dominate elite discourse in this country would have been that while Trump was a bad president, the fact that nothing “really bad” [meaning really bad in the eyes of an upper class white person naturally] ended up happening during his term was yet further proof of the Genius of the Framers, the basic health of American institutions, etc. etc.

Of course this argument was always going to be equivalent to “I’ve driven home a few times after knocking back a half dozen drinks and nothing bad happened so stop being hysterical about my drinking and driving.” Now that 63 million voters have managed to wrap the nation around a telephone poll by choosing to put a corrupt lazy ignorant imbecile at the wheel, we probably won’t be getting too many versions of that particular brand of savvy. Probably.

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