Covid's Death Toll
COVID has been dominating our lives for some long that it is easy to lose perspective on how much death this virus has brought upon the world.
So, one wonders, how many people have died because of the Covid-19 pandemic?
The Economist puts the number above 17 million globally:
The answer depends both on the data available, and on how you define “because”. Many people who die while infected with SARS-CoV-2 are never tested for it, and do not enter the official totals. Conversely, some people whose deaths have been attributed to covid-19 had other ailments that might have ended their lives on a similar timeframe anyway.
Despite our size and economic power, and to our ongoing shame, the United States accounts for a disproportionate number of the total deaths.
The Two Americas
Two Americas are emerging: vaccinated America and unvaccinated America.
At this point, Covid is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Perhaps the most highly vaccinated large county in America, according to New York Times data, is Montgomery County, Md., just outside the District of Columbia. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 93 percent of those 12 and older there are fully vaccinated, compared to around 70 percent nationally. The number dying over the past week is eight times as high nationally — 3.4 per 1 million — as it is in Montgomery County — 0.4 per 1 million — even as Montgomery County is near some virus hotspots.
Politics as a death sentence
An underappreciated plot-line in our ongoing horror show is that political allegiance is increasingly the defining difference between those who live and those who die in the two Americas.
The diverging trend in deaths per capita between Trump supporters and Biden supporters is stunning.
No matter how you slice it, Trump's multi-year anti-truth, anti-Covid crusade is directly or indirectly responsible for thousands upon thousands of deaths.
