Tag: Illinois

How many deaths did the Covid response cause?

image credit: Tyler Merbler (CC BY 2.0)

Thanks to Center Square via Wirepoints  for alerting me to a (weekly?) mortality tally from the CDC. It provides weekly counts of death by underlying natural cause, for each state.  For Illinois, unredacted Covid-19 deaths started with the week ending March 21, and the report covers the 22 weeks thru August 15.  Counts for 2019 as well as 2020 are shown.  My tally below attributes to Covid those deaths where it is an “underlying cause.”

             Covid      All other     Total

Year 2019             N A                       43,223                  43,223

Year 2020            6,779                     46,537                  53,316

So if I am interpreting this correctly, we seem to have had 46,537-43,223=3314 excess deaths, not due to Covid, but possibly due to the plandemic lockdown measures.  Given that most Covid victims had co-morbities, which might for some have proved fatal without Covid, this figure must be an understatement. Further, if some excess deaths are due to people not getting routine screening or treatment during the lockdown, those might not show up until some time hence.

Having no expertise in epidemiology nor politics…

…I still feel qualified to express opinions regarding COVID-19

Here’s a chart from the excellent 91-divoc site:

(The country you can’t see, overwritten by Switzerland, is Canada.)  What I make of this is that maybe the Swedish approach, relatively unrestricted, works about as well as the Illinois approach, pretty locked down except for big demonstrations. Otoh, if the Danes are similar to Swedes, then the former nation’s lockdown might have been quite helpful in reducing deaths.  To a level almost as low as Texas, tho we’ll see how that works out in the coming month or so.

Go play with the site, recently enhanced to allow comparisons between U S states and nations.  It’s great fun.