I went to Macrotrends this morning. I went there to compare the rate of death in the United States in 2020 so that I could see if covid-19 is causing an increased number of fatalities as compared with the past. I was happy to see no change in the death rate in the United States when comparing 2019 to 2020. But then I noticed that Macrotrends is only estimating death rates for 2020 based on 2019 and that site doesn’t have official numbers yet. If you go back to 2018, the rate of death was slightly higher then than that being reported for 2019.

According to an article published by American Thinker, by Matthew Vadum in April, the CDC doesn’t have hard data either. They’ve been running estimates. Those estimates probably exagerrate the number of covid-19 deaths. Also, there isn’t a standardized way to declare that a death has been caused by covid-19. Some say there are several examples of deaths attributed to covid-19 that were actually caused by something else like a gun shot wound. The press continues to dramatize covid-19 deaths. It is up to you to decide what you think. In any case, there’s no reason today for you to be afraid that deaths from covid-19 today are outpacing the death rates in March. Deaths from covid-19 are declining even with some wrong reporting.

There’s another interesting statistic that you can see for yourself when you look at the Macrotrend numbers at the posting that I list for you below. The rate of deaths in the United States started going up in 2009. The Great Recession marked a turning point in U.S. mortality statistics. Previous to that time, people were living a little longer every year. 2009 was the year that the death rate stopped decreasing and started increasing. Increasing rates of mortality has been with us ever since. And that was before covid-19.

Dire assumptions were made about covid-19 in the early months that have proven false. One of the most serious mistakes was the assumption that everyone had no immunity to the novel coronavirus. But now it appears that many people are either immune to it or don’t become seriously ill from exposure to covid-19. As the virus passes through our population, fewer illnesses will break out over time. That’s why we see declining death rates since March.

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U.S. Death Rate 1950-2020, Macrotrends, http://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/unitedstates/death-rate, accessed 26 June 2020.

Matthew Vadum, American Thinker, The CDC Confesses to Lying About COVID-19 Death Numbers, https://canadafreepress.com/article/the-cdc-confesses-to-lying-about-covid-19-death-numbers, April 13, 2020, accessed 26 June.

ADDENDUM: According to a Reuter’s article, found at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-cases/coronavirus-may-have-infected-10-times-more-americans-than-reported-cdc-says-idUSKBN23W2PU, the peak of infection was in April and the CDC considers that many more people have already recovered without symptoms. A lot of new cases include people without illness. Isolating healthy people and wearing masks appear to have failed to stop the virus.