I am no longer sure what people mean by “excess” deaths. Excess against what measure? Rates in other countries? Avoidable deaths? Compared to some calculated trend over prior years in the US? This became an issue during the epidemic, when both CV-19 and the suppression actions supposedly caused excess deaths. A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association compares “excess” deaths in the US with those in other developed countries and attempts to identify causes behind these excess deaths. The study period was 1999 to 2022. Their definition of excess deaths was comparing rates in the US to rates in other countries, which generally have lower mortality rates at certain ages.
There were over 63.5 million deaths in the US during the study period. Supposedly 12.5 million of these, or around 20%, were excess deaths. Circulatory and metabolic diseases were allegedly the leading cause of these excess deaths, accounting for over 50% of them, which suggests the well-known US obesity problem as the underlying issue. Among young people, increases in excess deaths were attributed to alcohol abuse, drug overdoses and suicides. According to the authors we could reduce excess deaths if we just had social policies like other developed countries. According to me, if you adjust for minority population status in particular and a few other socio-demographic factors, a lot of those “excess” deaths would disappear. And if want to fix the underlying issue of poor health behaviors, adopting national health insurance isn’t going to help, but making people have consequences for eating too much, getting no exercise, smoking, and abusing drugs and alcohol would make a huge difference. (JAMA Study)
