The US Secretly Hit 1,000,000 COVID Deaths
Added 2022-01-03 20:18:13 +0000 UTCNew data from the CDC shows that we may have already hit one million COVID deaths in the United States, and that 1 in 5 deaths are unreported, primarily by public officials in parts of the country where safety measures are ignored, the severity of the pandemic is minimized, healthcare services are underfunded, vaccination rates are low, and excess deaths are abnormally high.
For example, despite Jackson, Mississippi, being a massive COVID hotspot, the county coroner has not submitted a single COVID death in 2021 because quote “his office doesn’t do COVID deaths. When it comes to COVID, we don’t do a test so we don’t know if someone has COVID or not.” Instead those deaths are recorded as heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, and COPD - despite obvious COVID symptoms and disease progression.
The right-wing conspiracy theory that COVID deaths are politically and fraudulently over-reported is absolutely wrong - while there have been a handful of statistically insignificant cases where someone with COVID died in something like a motorcycle accident, and was inaccurately added to COVID-19 death totals - the reality is that in the last two years, more than one million excess deaths have been counted compared to pre-pandemic years - and while 825,000 of those have been attributed to COVID, researchers estimate that 1 in 5 COVID deaths are not reported - especially when those deaths occur at home. And while some counties refuse to test for the disease to keep their numbers artificially low - other parts of the country, like Florida, are just outright lying about their active COVID numbers.
On the last day of 2021, Florida broke the daily COVID case record with 75,900 new cases in just 24 hours. But their death count has been misreported since August, when they changed their reporting methodology by post-dating COVID deaths, which makes it looks like the mortality rate is lower than it is compared to real-time updates from other states - and that artificially lower rate is used by the Florida government to justify reckless behavior that leads directly to more deaths.
But it’s also important to note that not all of the unreported excess COVID deaths are the result of political manipulation - they’re also the result of a healthcare system that has completely abandoned underprivileged communities. Excess deaths among Native, Hispanic, and Black Americans have been steadily rising without being directly reported - and that’s because those communities are less likely to seek medical attention due to the extreme cost and lack of available services.
The disparity actually highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affects those communities in the same way that those communities have struggled with health care access for decades. They are severely underrepresented in jobs that include health care benefits, and are systematically discriminated against by medical professionals when seeking healthcare services.
So on the one hand, right-leaning public officials who have a vested interest in reporting lower COVID figures are making a deliberate effort to underreport COVID deaths. And on the other hand, communities of color who have been discriminated against by the healthcare system are reluctant to trust or seek medical attention, and so their COVID deaths are also not being reported. While official figures point to 825,000 COVID deaths, the real number is estimated to be one million in the United States alone, and it’s steadily growing.
