COVID-19 Update

Try to ignore the awkwardly goofy nerdiness, and listen for things like:

• 98% of the states are still at high transmission rates for COVID-19, even though all the other numbers are still trending in the right direction
• The critters are getting it now too - which means we could be in for another round of Holy-Fuck-Here-We-Go
• 20 types of Cardiovascular disease are likely to be 50-70% worse post-COVID
• DeltaCron
• This shit ain't over

And of course we can always do with some more bad shit to think about, so here's the CDC telling us we're already well over the 1 million dead Americans mark. And we have to consider accounting for the number of people who have died (and will die) due to COVID-Related causes or complications - &/or because COVID kept them from getting the care they needed for something other than COVID-19.

We'll be dealing with this shit for a very long time.

WaPo: (pay wall)

U.S. ‘excess deaths’ during pandemic surpassed 1 million, with covid killing most but other diseases adding to the toll, CDC says

The United States has recorded more than 1 million “excess deaths” since the start of the pandemic, government mortality statistics show, a toll that exceeds the officially documented lethality of the coronavirus and captures the broad consequences of the health crisis that has entered its third year.

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. The center updates its estimate weekly.

Although the vast majority of the excess deaths are due to the virus, the CDC mortality records also expose swollen numbers of deaths from heart disease, hypertension, dementia and other ailments across two years of pandemic misery.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Anderson said.

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.

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