The Aftermath of COVID: Four Years Later

July 3, by Edward Ring

The years of COVID deaths are finally becoming a memory, but many years remain before we will fully understand what happened. As we uncover more facts, learn from our mistakes, and, where we have to, hold people accountable, we should resist the temptation to reinvent history. COVID may have disproportionately targeted the elderly and the infirm, and in our response, we should have recognized that before locking down the whole country and pressuring the entire population to accept experimental vaccines. Nonetheless, COVID was a deadly disease that killed millions of people before their time.

The fact that COVID was a deadly and unique threat should not fade away, but in the face of ongoing rhetoric to the contrary, it can be forgotten. Serious commentators continue to claim that COVID was just another flu. For example, on June 20, Tucker Carlson hosted Neil Oliver, who has always come across as an extraordinarily perceptive commentator, and during the conversation, Oliver pointed out that “the flu disappeared when COVID came along,” and Carlson noted that he “didn’t know anyone who ever got COVID. In subsequent interviews, Carlson has repeated that observation.

Anecdotal evidence should not replace relevant data, but it can be useful to corroborate data. And from that perspective, one must wonder how Carlson’s entire network of family, friends, and friends of friends all managed to escape COVID. I know of hundreds of people who caught COVID and more than a few who died from the disease. I have spoken at-length with at least a dozen practicing doctors who described COVID as a unique new disease that targets whatever physical weakness a person may have, a disease that, according to these doctors, burdened America’s health care system nearly to the breaking point. It is simply not possible that all of these doctors were in on some conspiracy to reclassify the flu as COVID or to overstate the magnitude of the pandemic.

It’s also self-contradictory to suggest that COVID was nothing more than a severe flu variant, hyped by the government for ulterior motives. Even if the second half of that statement is true, why, if one believes our government is capable of such malevolence, would they declare a pandemic based on a phony pathogen when it’s just as easy and far more effective to release a genuine pathogen?

The data from the Center for Disease Control is unambiguous. It tracks three potentially fatal respiratory illnesses—pneumonia, influenza, and COVID. Their data from 2017 through the first half of 2024 shows a surge in pneumonia deaths during the COVID era. For the years 2017, 2018, and 2019, annual pneumonia deaths were consistently around 175,000 per year in the U.S. Zero COVID deaths were reported in those years. Then in 2020, pneumonia deaths rose sharply to 357,000 and reached an even higher 408,000 in 2021. In 2022, while down somewhat, pneumonia deaths were still higher than normal at 266,000, only leveling back down to a more typical 189,000 in 2023.

Meanwhile, COVID deaths hit 392,000 in 2020, 457,000 in 2021, and 244,000 in 2022, finally dropping to 75,000 in 2023. As COVID deaths rose, pneumonia deaths also rose. What about influenza?

The first thing to observe with the numbers for influenza is how low they are relative to pneumonia. They are also more variable. In 2017, there were 8,000 flu deaths, jumping to 14,000 in 2018, followed by 7,000 in 2019, and 9,000 in 2020. Reported flu deaths did drop to only 1,000 in 2021 before rising back to a more typical 9,000 in 2022 and 6,000 in 2023. But these numbers for the flu are orders of magnitude lower than those reported for pneumonia and COVID. So no, during the COVID era, the flu didn’t “disappear.” More to the point, neither did pneumonia.

The suspicion that reported deaths from the flu or from pneumonia may have been diminished during the COVID pandemic in order to make it appear that COVID deaths were more numerous than they actually were is based on alleged errors in classification. But as it turns out, just taking a look at the CDC’s weekly reporting on deaths from respiratory illnesses proves that if they were reclassifying pneumonia deaths as COVID deaths, they weren’t doing a very good job at it. Because the CDC data shows pneumonia deaths more than doubling in 2020 and 2021 compared to the three preceding years. Why would they leave so much fraud on the table if, in fact, they were fraudulently reclassifying deaths to inflate COVD numbers?

Another way to prove something horrible happened would be to look at reports showing deaths from all causes in the U.S. over the past several years. Needless to say, this is a harder data point to reclassify. We don’t have to do an autopsy to see if you had the COVID virus in your system. If you’re dead, you’re dead.

Using this logic, it is possible to compare the death rates since COVID came along to the death rates prior to COVID. To do this, I took CDC data on deaths from all causes for the years 2013 through 2019, then adjusting for population growth, plotted them as repeating 12-month cycles on a timeline that begins in January 2020 and runs through April 2024. On the chart, the grey line is based on how many people died in the U.S. per week based on the population-adjusted average from 2013 through 2019. These seven years of pre-COVID data were remarkably consistent, only deviating by a few percentage points. They go up in the winter months when more people die of pneumonia and flu, and drop every summer. Based on these extrapolations, the grey line therefore predicts how many people would have died each week over the past four years if COVID hadn’t come along.

The upper line on the chart shows actual deaths from all causes in the U.S. by week since January 2020, when the lines were converged. The spikes over these past 4.5 years are mostly mirroring the grey line—more people die in winter—with exceptions in the fall of 2020 and 2021, when COVID deaths surged anyway.

Underlying this graphic image are numbers that belie any possibility that we lived in normal times and COVID was a hoax. Sadly, and inexplicably, people we need to rely on for news that isn’t mainstream misinformation or fringe element lunacy are reinventing history. For this revisionism to come from people like Neil Oliver and Tucker Carlson is disappointing. During the four and a half years we’ve lived through since COVID came along, 12.4 million Americans have died. If we had been living in normal times, only 10.5 million Americans would have died. With a sample size as huge as the U.S. population, this extrapolation can be made with a high degree of accuracy, as is proven by the remarkable consistency in death statistics during the years 2013 through 2019.

What these numbers tell us is that since COVID came along, 1.9 million people died in excess of what would have been expected based on death rates in the preceding seven years. Of those, not quite 1.2 million deaths were attributable to COVID deaths, and another 500,000 can be attributed to elevated rates of death from pneumonia. The idea that COVID wasn’t a devastating pandemic merely because a handful of influential commentators say they don’t know anyone who died is ridiculous, and it damages the credibility of people we need to be credible.

The good news, however, is that COVID deaths and excess deaths both appear to be slowly fading away. Excess deaths in the U.S. in April 2024 were only 4 percent over what we might have predicted for that month based on pre-COVID death rates. That is the lowest it’s been since this all began. Who knows, maybe if our population totals reflected the mass migrations we’ve experienced since the beginning of the Biden presidency, the adjustments for population growth would yield an extrapolation with zero excess deaths. That is a possibility worth savoring, and perhaps one of the few upsides of Biden’s open borders.