The Concord Monitor has been keeping track. Of What? Deaths. Not just from COVID19 (people who died with or from, not that NH distinguishes) but extra or excess deaths. Mortality above the five-year average for the state, according to them. They found 440 of them, but wait until you see how they describe these.
Related: Rep. Marsh’s Remarks Riven with Misinformation on Masks and the Spread of COVID19
How many people have died in New Hampshire because of COVID-19?
That seems a straightforward question but it’s actually pretty complicated. One possible answer is: 440 more than we have counted.
That tells me that the Monitor thinks (or wants us to think) there could be 440 COVID19 related deaths than the State’s Dashboard has reported. As in, all deaths are because of the pandemic. Am I wrong?
Health officials know that pandemics can kill people indirectly. It makes them skip medical care for treatable diseases because they’re afraid to leave their house; it delays care because hospitals and doctors are too busy; it kills people through stress that leads to heart attacks and strokes, or by driving them to drink or drugs; it changes lives in ways that cause more fatal accidents.
The Pandemic did all that? Or was it politicians making choices about what rights you were free to exercise? The Monitor can’t bring itself to go there.
According to figures released each week by the CDC, through late November 943 more people have died in New Hampshire than the average at that point in the previous five years. Subtracting the 500 deaths directly caused by COVID-19, we’re left with about 440 excess deaths to explain.
Does this mean that 440 Granite Staters who died this year would have been alive if there had been no pandemic? Perhaps, but not necessarily.
“This is incredibly complex,” said Tricia Tilley, deputy director of the Division of Public Health.
In one respect, it is complex. The Monitor notes that the data is incomplete (there could be more non-covid-covid-response-related deaths).
We’ve also had previous years with hundreds of extra deaths, though these 440 are reportedly above the 5-year average.
What is not complex is this. At no point in this piece does the Monitor suggest that any of these excess deaths result from the political response Democrats favor even more than of His Majesty, Gov. Sununu. These are deaths because of the pandemic, even if SARS CoV2 does not cause them.
That’s the message.
Democrats can now point at this piece of “reliable” reporting and confidently say that deaths by overdose, suicide, domestic or child abuse (any cause at all) could be blamed on COVID19. But even the CDC even admits that many are the result of the comorbidities of those who died.
The math from NH’s COVID dashboard looks like this. If you are 69 or younger in the granite State and test positive you have a 99.8% chance of surviving. If you are 70 or older, you have a 14% chance of dying.
If you are 59 or younger, your chances of dying if infected are 0.081%. But I bet the odds are excellent that nearly all 440 of these other deaths are in that age group. People with nothing to fear from COVID19. But that’s not the message here.
If you want to justify unnecessary lockdowns, quarantines, curfews, and mask mandates that may have accounted for nearly as many deaths by other means in our state, you take those 440 deaths, and you blame them on the pandemic.
Not politicians, local city councils, or a quarantine and lockdown policy that destroys businesses, families, and lives.
If the Monitor wants to impress, publish the percentage risk by age group on the front page every day, and then see how the people feel about the political response.