Originally COVID was pretty scary. The rising deaths in April of 2020 had everyone on edge. The red line in the graph below is 2020 deaths, you can see, by month 4 (April), we hit our peek, then there was a steady decline down in NJ population deaths. Follow the red line to the second peek in December of 2020, followed by a slow decline in 2021 which is the yellow line. The yellow line is pretty close to the expected death levels to the past years, so things are improving because of vaccines, therapeutics and natural immunity.
The gray lines are previous years, to give you a reference as to the NJ deaths occur normally. If you don’t work on death models all the time like I do, its hard to understand that there is an expected number of deaths every month. And always remember:
Now when I look at the yellow line it 2020, its pretty clear we are far from where we once were. There is an irrational fear that we get back to the April 2020 death levels. Its highly unlikely for 2 reasons:
When a new virus is dropped into a virgin population, its largest impact happens in the first wave. As people get infected they either die, or become immune (yes natural immunity is a thing) and are no longer at risk for infection. As time goes on, the disease will spread less and less. We’ve been through 19 months and 2 waves. Its time to admit the virus is endemic and none of these measures will help. They didn’t even slow spread in the NJ first wave as seen by that April 2020 spike.
The lockdowns killed additional people who would not have died from COVID19. Don’t do that again governors. Its a bad idea. I will be doing a series on NJ death data and I can show you how these shutdown measures and Governor Murphy’s mandates kill people.
We have a vaccine that somewhat helps reduce the risk of death. It was never developed to reduce spread.
At some point we just have to realize that our risk of death from other reasons are more likely than death from COVID19 and then MOVE ON. At this point, with my age and health status, its more likely for me to die in a car accident, so I’d like my life back please. Below shows each month and how many people died from COVID vs other top diseases.
How many months to we need to continue these measures when we are at higher risk of cancer in heart disease. Even over the of summer 2020 we were at higher risk to die from homicide/suicide/injury than COVID19 and the government still lets me drive my car with my kids in it. Its now time for the government to let us make other decisions for ourselves. But Governor Murphy can’t do that. He’s predicting an up-tick in infections in November-December. I call that “cold and flu season” but he see's it as an opportunity to “protect” us. I call THAT “oppression”. Remember in July when everyone was going to die from the Delta so we all had to hunker down with pandemic procedures? Well, everyone was still more likely to die from the typical diseases
Its time for everyone to demand their life that. Pandemic OVER.
Yes! Wonderful article. I wish the whole world could read this and have some common sense.