Is it really linked to the pandemic though? I don’t mean to be conspiratorial, I’ll happily believe it if someone can explain, but frankly the pandemic seems to me like a very small drop in a huge bucket of problems the world has that would exacerbate mortality.

Some factors I would easily think have much more impact than covid would be higher wealth inequality leading to widespread poverty, higher crime, vaccine and more general healthcare hesitancy, crumbling public services and rising cost of private alternatives, increased homelessness and stress caused by housing insecurity due to extremely high costs and jobs being few and far between while low paid and highly insecure as layoffs never seem to end and good luck finding one of you’re not already working, and all that at least intuitively to me can far more easily kill people than a virus with flu symptoms that largely stopped 5 years ago.

Obviously way back during the pandemic it’s understandable there were some excess deaths directly caused by the virus for people who were already one foot there who also ended up getting the virus, but in retrospect the whole thing wasn’t even that big a deal, sat at home for like a month in April and that was it, most people either didn’t have it at all or didn’t even know they had it, and seemed to enjoy the excitement and the change of pace to working from home and the accompanying lower transport cost, now how would this fairly benign event still cause much of anything, let alone excess mortality?