I like to think by slowing the COVID-19 virus, it is allowing doctors to deal with other medical problems too. I never complain when President Trump is focused on reducing the COVID-19 death toll. I think 20K dead Americans is tragic.
Actually, slowing this down isn't helping patients with the other conditions.
It's just dragging out all the protocols that now are added to getting treatment for critical conditions, and bumping little things like a skin biopsy to the back of the bus.
In the meantime, people are still dying of all of these (2017 numbers):
Heart disease: 647,457 Cancer: 599,108 Accidents (unintentional injuries): 169,936
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 160,201
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 146,383
Alzheimer’s disease: 121,404
Diabetes: 83,564
Influenza and Pneumonia: 55,672
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis: 50,633
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,173
sourceand it is likely anyone who dies of the above (in red) will be said to have died of COVID-19 if they test positive, whether they had mild or no symptoms of COVID-19 or not, but note that eight of the top ten causes of death are comorbidity factors in COVID-19.
In this state, 100% of the dead attributed to the virus had one or more of those underlying medical issues.
So, did they die
from the virus or just
with it? We'll never know.
In an ordinary year, without the virus:
Number of deaths: 2,813,503
Death rate: 863.8 deaths per 100,000 population (same source as above stats).
Ignoring the comorbidity factors, we aren't even at one percent of that ordinary annual total.