The U.S. has recorded nearly 300,000 excess deaths not attributable to Covid since 2020 with researchers tying the spike to lockdowns and delays in healthcare, according to a new report from DailyMail.
The total number of excess deaths since 2020 topped 1.2 million, but only about 295,000 did not have Covid listed as the main cause of death on the death certificate, the DailyMail found after an analysis of CDC data.
Most of the excess deaths are from cancer, heart disease, drug overdoses, and firearms. Medical professionals say that government mandates prevented those who needed care the most from seeing their doctors, resulting in the deaths of thousands.
“It’s a hard question to decide how many lives were saved by the shutdowns themselves,” Dr. Coady Wing, a health policy expert at Indiana University, told DailyMail. “What we’re finding is that some of the things people did to avoid Covid risk, one of those things was to cut down of regular health care utilization, and that had health consequences.”
The U.S. is not alone in facing the grim consequences of pandemic lockdown policies.
England’s National Health Service (NHS) will pay out more than a billion pounds to settle compensation claims for “criminal negligence” after families who lost loved ones during the pandemic hired lawyers to sue the government.
Europe now faces a cancer epidemic because of missed screenings during the pandemic. More than 100 million cancer screenings were missed, and as many as one million Europeans may now have an undiagnosed cancer because of government lockdown measures, Timcast previously reported.
While the UK and other European countries had national lockdowns, in the U.S. restrictions were imposed on a state-by-state basis. Though there was no national lockdown policy, the decisions made by states and local jurisdictions contributed to spikes in excess mortality in the U.S.
Wing says that many had their health condition deteriorate or had catchable diseases go unnoticed because of the lockdowns.
“Cutting back care for Covid sensitive groups was bad for their health,” he said.
Additionally, some patients made decisions to miss medical appointments out of fear, having been so deeply scared by the media and government officials that they decided to stay home.
