COVID Happily Ever After?

The COVID-19 pandemic had played out like a fairy tale for most people. In the first act normal everyday life was interrupted by a dark and deadly mythical creature. In the second act heroic scientists helped the millions of people who were dying by creating an invincible vaccine. For many, once they took the vaccine, the story was over, they were vaxed and done and life returned to normal. Masks came off and everyone huddled together indoors to comfort one another, and spread the disease.

However the vaccines do not actually protect against infection, it protects against hospitalization and death. There is also another segment of the population who decided that vaccines were a hoax and they refuse to ever get vaccinated. There is plenty of human wood for the COVID forest fire to continue to burn through.

We are in a relative calm right now, but hospitalizations have begun to climb again due to immune evasive new variants. No one knows how high the next infection wave will rise this winter. Flu which has been on the sidelines because of social isolation and masking is now coming back with a renewed vengeance along with RSV. This winter promises a triple whammy of infections.

The other factor is that the immediate threat from a COVID infection is not always apparent at the first flush of infection. Cardio vascular disease, diabetes, blood clots, along with heart disease, and brain problems are being discovered months and even years after the initial infection.

So just how many people have died due to the pandemic so far? The pandemic directly or indirectly caused 14.9 million deaths in 2020 and 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on May 5, 2022, in its newest attempt to quantify the outbreak’s toll. That’s around 2.7 times more than the 5.42 million COVID-19 deaths the WHO says were previously reported through official channels in the same 2-year period. Over 2,000 Americans continue to die each week from COVID-19 and this seems to have become the accepted new normal.

On top of this, excess deaths are on the rise. Excess deaths are the number of deaths above what would be expected over a 5 year average. Excess deaths are happening in every age group.  The number of excess deaths today is higher that the number of deaths from COVID-19 at the start of the pandemic lockdown. For some reason no one is reporting about this rise in excess deaths. My concern is that these deaths could be the result of the after effects from COVID infections. There is likely collateral damage. I however an not a scientist, so don’t take my word on that point. It is just my suspicion. The long term effect of COVID infections are only now being discovered. And the media remains silent.