One of the prime damages done by the epidemic lockdowns was disruption of normal care patterns for people with serious illnesses. The terror campaign waged by people like King Walz, Fauci et al further discouraged people from seeking care when they had obvious symptoms of trouble, including people with symptoms of heart attacks. So we saw more people dying at home or being hospitalized with more serious complications than if they had called an ambulance or gone to an ER. A new study examines patterns of heart attack issues in the Medicare fee-for-service population before, during and after the epidemic, from January 2018 to December 2023.
The researchers found there were about 1,150,000 heart attack episodes in this period. Overall, heart attacks declined during the epidemic and after it was over. But deaths in hospitals among heart attack victims increased during the epidemic, then returned to pre-epidemic trends after it was over. There was a clear pattern during the epidemic of people not seeking early treatment for heart attacks and then having worse outcomes. Some of the lower incidence in heart attacks during the epidemic may be people not seeking treatment for minor ones and some may be differences in the FFS Medicare population versus Medicare Advantage, which was growing rapidly during this period. It also may reflect large numbers of deaths attributed to CV-19 in the Medicare population, particularly among those in poor health. (JAMA Article)
