The Elephant in the Room
It is not a tragedy when elderly people get sick and die.
If you’re like me, you know someone with no previous history of heart issues who dropped dead of a heart attack over the past year.
If you’re like me, you know someone who seemed perfectly healthy who dropped dead suddenly of a stroke over the past year.
But let’s leave that for another time.
What I want to talk about is the fact that I still don’t know a single person who has died from covid. Do you?
If you do, that person was almost certainly very old, or old AND unwell.
We are 2.5 years into the covid pandemic. Not a single true celebrity has died from covid ON THE ENTIRE PLANET. Don’t people notice?
Yes, I know about Colin Powell. At the time of his death, he was suffering from both late-stage cancer and from Parkinson’s disease. And he was 84.
Here is a list of “cultural figures the U.S. lost to COVID-19.” If you take a look you will see that those on the list are either moderately famous people who actually did not die from covid, or people who actually are not famous.
Tom Seaver is in the moderately famous category. He had been suffering from a severe sort of dementia for 7 years at the time of his death. People with Lewy body dementia usually live 5 to 8 years after diagnosis. Seaver lived 7.
Cloris Leachman is also in the moderately famous category. She died in her sleep of a stroke. At age 94.
In the not famous category are people like Nashom Wooden and Floyd Cardoz and Jennifer Arnold. I have not heard of them. Have you? And in any event, I doubt that covid is responsible for their deaths. Many people whose deaths were attributed to covid early in the pandemic were actually killed by the doctors who ventilated them to death or medicated them to death with Remdesivir.
Over 600 people have served as members of Congress since the start of the pandemic. Most of them are old (but not extremely old) men. None of them has died from covid.
Yes, I know about Ron Wright. He was being treated for lung cancer at the time of his death.
However, 33 sitting members of Congress died from causes other than covid during just the first 1.5 years of the pandemic.
My father was very healthy until he got kidney cancer in his early seventies. He died at age 74. It is sad, particularly for me and others who knew him. But it is not a tragedy.
Is there a point where the majority of people realize that it is is not a tragedy when people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties get sick and die?
Is there a point where the majority of people realize that covid is not a significant public health problem?
Is there a point where the majority of people realize that attempting to avoid a ubiquitous respiratory virus that poses little to no risk of death to them is not only futile but insane?
Is there a point where the majority of people realize that re-organizing society in order to “control” such a virus is not only futile and insane, but inhuman?
Thank you for writing this.
Not one person in my life got very sick, let alone died, from covid. I've asked just about everyone I've come across over the last two years if they know anyone who died from the virus. In every single instance where someone had a friend or family member die, the person was elderly, obese, and/or had comorbidities.
Of course, anytime a human being passes away it is sad, especially for their loved ones. Still, the tragedy here is the harm that's been inflicted on children, the poor and other disenfranchised people because there was never a good faith public discussion about the cost benefits of the covid policies put in place. This calamity will be felt for a generation and it's incumbent upon us to make sure it never happens again.
Perfectly stated Daniel. Was making a similar point in Emma Woodhouse's recent piece this week [1], it's absolutely insane that we are now supposed to treat the deaths of the elderly as a devastating tragedy which could have been prevented. Ludicrous.
I can't understand how stories like this one, which reflects on the unforeseen death of the original "first Covid Casualty", Marion Krueger, made it to print. It tells the story of an 85 year old woman who was recovering from a broken hip, acquired infections (including a bad UTI) in the hospital, declined for the next two months, and eventually died February 26th. After a PCR test they identified Covid 19 present. Which apparently causes hips to break and UTIs?
What alternate universe do people live in where they aren't aware this how roughly 2 million elderly people die each year in the US? Something goes wrong, then more things go wrong, and in a cascade your body fails, and you die. She made it to 85. Be grateful she had such a healthy and vibrant life. Cut this "she deserved another decade" bullshit. This is exactly how my grandparents died in their early 80's back in 2018 and 2017 and we celebrated the life they had without deluding ourselves they were owed another decade.
Amazingly, despite Covid apparently getting into nursing homes in the suburbs of Washington State in January of 2020, they had zero excess deaths until the fall of 2020 (even then in 2020 for Washington only had 3% more deaths than usual). Which is mind boggling considering they weren't wearing masks, schools were open, people where eating at restaurants that whole time people were spreading Covid around before it made it to Mrs. Krueger.
Thankfully everyone in Washington quickly got vaccinated by the end of 2020/early 2021 so that in 2021 they "only" saw a +14% increase in all-cause mortality. Perhaps if they would have matched the even higher vax rate of Vermont they could have beaten the Green Mountain States' impressive +16% all-cause mortality bump in 2021. (For some reason the media didn't bother following up on how Vermont had such a massive spike in all-cause mortality after they declared Vermont victorious over covid while noting the cases were skyrocketing [3])
[1] https://woodhouse.substack.com/p/start-spreading-the-news/comment/8901619
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/1st-covid-19-deaths-us-year-kids-grappling/story?id=76202200
Choice quote from this article:
"American nursing homes have been among the hardest hit by the pandemic, with at least 130,079 resident deaths according to government data." < REALLY??? Amazing coincidence that the place where we put the frailest elderly people before they die happens to be where people die!
[3] https://www.vpr.org/vpr-news/2021-12-01/why-vermonts-covid-surge-isnt-surprising
^This article is hilarious "There’s another factor at play that could help explain why Vermont, in particular, has seen such high case counts in recent weeks: Only a small proportion of residents have had a COVID infection. That’s not the case across the country."