Wikipedia just completed its recording of notable deaths for February, and the reading is cause for optimism. There were a little under 700 deaths recorded, which is in line with pre-pandemic years (blue column). This is a big improvement on January which came in line with the pandemic years (red column). It's also a big improvement on February 2022 (yellow column).
 |
| Notable deaths according to Wikipedia |
Comparing January and February of this year with individual years from 2018 to 2022, we discover an interesting pattern. Death rates didn't take off before March 2020, and the numbers stayed persistently high until January 2023, with 900 notable deaths. But this has now dropped off a cliff.
One way of reading this is that deaths went up as soon as government bureaucrats started to dictate remedies and solutions in March 2020. The deaths remained high for the following years, when most people were following government recommendations.
The last booster campaign that resulted in people taking their recommended medicines took place in December and January of this winter, but scepticism has grown since then, and the sharp drop off we've seen in February may simply reflect the fact that people no longer follow government recommendations.
We are not yet seeing negative excess deaths, which is something we should see before we can say that things are back to normal, but the latest numbers are promising. They indicate that the harm done by the official response to the pandemic is transitory. Once people stop following government recommendations, they become noticeable more healthy.
 |
| Notable deaths in 2018, 19, 20 and 21 |
No comments:
Post a Comment