During the COVID-19 pandemic, death was constantly in the news.
It seemed like every day, a report would come out saying thousands of deaths occurred from the disease, justifying the continuation of the lockdown.
Even now, four years after the coronavirus swept across the world, The New York Times still has a page that tracks the number of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19.
But what about the lives lost that weren’t reported?
Of course, if those deaths were tied directly at the hands of the disease, the establishment media would have been frothing at the mouth to add more ticks to the total.
No, the ones that weren’t reported came from something else — the policies that regulated life during the pandemic era.
For instance, suicides were up significantly from what would be expected in normal, non-pandemic years.
A February 2023 study from the National Library of Medicine noted “that the adult general population showed a larger increase in both suicidal ideation and suicide attempt, and the increase in suicidal ideation was particularly noticeable,” from the pandemic period.
While the results are sad to see, they are far from surprising. Isolating individuals — or even families — into their homes for a long period as the world around them screams of the end times is clearly not good for mental health.
Did COVID lockdowns do more harm than good?
But that’s far from the only cause of death the lockdowns exacerbated.
A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in February 2023 stated there was a 29 percent increase in deaths from excessive alcohol use when comparing 2016-2017 to 2020-2021.
The report said that 2016-2017 saw 138,000 deaths in the United States from excessive alcohol use rising to 178,000 in 2020-2021, an increase of nearly one-third.
That means 40,000 more people drank themselves to death than would have if the pandemic never occurred.
Of course, there is no 100 percent guarantee that this difference came from the lockdowns. There is a chance that it was simply a high year for alcohol-related deaths.
But the conclusion is reasonable that at least a notable percentage of that increase came from pandemic-era policies that led to overconsumption.
As bureaucrats — with the blessing of leaders in both political parties, but primarily Democratic support — continued to impose pandemic restrictions to last longer in the name of saving lives, did they ever stop to think about the lives it was costing?
Perhaps they liked having a population listening to every word the government was saying, desperately hoping for a day when the ability to live normally would return.
Now, it’s clear that the data shows lives were lost that weren’t simply the result of infection.
They were lives that didn’t need to be lost if governments at all levels had considered all the costs of the policies they employed.
