Quote:
Originally Posted by mkitrn
why not nuke all of North America if millions of deaths don’t matter?
I don’t have a nuke. Or access to one. I’m not even on the nuclear surety program any more. I left that business to become an airline pilot.
Seriously, I’m no more anxious to go than the next guy, but three million COVID deaths worldwide out of a population of 7.86 Billion is a flea bite. It ain’t Armageddon.
The Plague of Justinian in the 6th century took out between 30 and 50 million people - nearly half of the world population - and that wasn’t a flea bite, but it wasn’t Armageddon either.
And from the look of it, the US is going to end up 2020 - once all the bodies get counted - with something like 83,000 drug overdose deaths already reported, most in people far younger than the COVID mortality demographic. The YPLL (Years of Potential Life Lost) of fentanyl deaths alone exceeded the YPLL for COVID deaths. Yet no one claims that’s Armageddon.
Quote:
The CDC’s National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) provides monthly provisional data on predicted total drug overdose deaths during the preceding 12 months. The most recent data reflect September 2019 through August 2020. During that period, there were 88,295 predicted deaths, a record high that is almost 19,000 more deaths (27%) than the prior 12-month period.
Using these predicted data in combination with final data from 2019, we estimated monthly overdose deaths from January to August 2020. Our estimates show that total overdose deaths spiked to record levels in March 2020 after the pandemic hit. Monthly deaths grew by about 50 percent between February and May to more than 9,000; they were likely still around 8,000 in August. Prior to 2020, U.S. monthly overdose deaths had never risen above 6,300.
Opioid-related deaths drove these increases, specifically synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. Opioids accounted for around 75 percent of all overdose deaths during the early months of the pandemic; around 80 percent of those included synthetic opioids.
CDC recently published an interactive visualization tool with preliminary weekly estimates of overdose deaths. These data suggest that overdose deaths remained elevated well into the fall before declining toward the prepandemic baseline near the start of 2021. The final 2020 total in the United States could exceed 90,000 overdose deaths, compared to 70,630 in 2019. That would not only be the highest annual number on record, but the largest single-year percentage increase in the past 20 years.
Every single death is a tragedy, but we are nowhere close to Armageddon.
11-11-2023
Today
