Few Causes for Optimism in Covid-19’s Toll — Yet
A decline in mortality is likely to follow the pandemic, but not until it's actually over.
In memory of the 200,000 plus Americans dead.
Photographer: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/BloombergCovid-19 is especially hard on the old and frail, with 79% of the deaths attributed to the disease in the U.S. among those 65 and older and 94% among people with at least one “comorbidity” such as diabetes, dementia, obesity or hypertension.
This has led some people to argue that most of the country’s 200,000-plus deaths so far from the disease somehow shouldn’t count, which is ghoulish and awful. But I don’t think it’s ghoulish or awful to point out that a lot of the people dying from the coronavirus this year would have died from something else in the not-too-distant future, albeit likely in more pleasant circumstances than alone in a hospital room hooked up to a ventilator.