OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state.Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said.“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”Davison was one of several business leaders who spoke during the virtual news conference on Dec. 30 that was organized by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths, Davison said.“What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”
Emphasis added. H/t: D29, who also cites a source which notes that the increase in death is coming late enough in the pandemic that the disease itself is not a likely explanation -- and that death rates from the disease seem to be down, even as much as half as last year. These deaths correlate with the vaccines' becoming widely distributed through society, though that correlation is not proof that there is a casual relationship. The leading proven cause of death for most of this population (18-45) is (suddenly) fentanyl overdose.
The fentanyl that is killing so many Americans of working age is being driven by Chinese production. Mexican fentanyl is not nearly so pure nor so deadly, but Chinese-produced fentanyl is being made available to the cartels in Mexico.
So here is another theory about the cause: the pandemic has driven higher illicit drug use among America's working age population of 18-45. This is also, please note, America's military age population. Chinese sources are providing large amounts of deadly chemicals to be added to the illicit drugs, which is thinning America's military population.
Why would they do that? Payback to the West for the opium wars and so forth, perhaps; or as a preparatory measure for the war they expect when they try to take Taiwan, reducing our potential fighting forces even in case of a draft; or just because it makes them money, and anything that makes money is a good thing -- whether it entails forced-labor/slavery of the Uighurs or the Tibetans, the brutal working conditions in their factories, or dead Americans.
I think it would be fair to characterize it as at least potentially a military attack on the American people, however, if it can be shown that the Chinese government is knowingly contributing to the flows of these drugs to Mexico. You might even regard it as the first shot, already fired, in the next World War.
What drives illicit drug use is people choosing to numb themselves. Better to address the source of the pain or, failing that, to endure.
ReplyDeletePeople who want to be numb will find a way to be numb, drug laws or no drug laws. There's value in finding ways to warn people that the drug they're ingesting is not quite what they think, especially when it's brand-new but looks just like an old one, but we won't stop fentanyl use by getting mad at China any more than we will by locking people up for selling or using it.
The thing that is different in this case from the usual libertarian drug arguments, Tex, is that nobody is trying to use fentanyl. It’s being used to cut things they think they are buying, like heroin or cocaine. Even libertarians object to fraud.
ReplyDeletePerhaps especially if the fraud is also an intentional act of murder, designed to weaken a population in advance of an intended war of aggression.
I agree, there's value in finding ways to warn people that the drug they're ingesting is not quite what they think.
ReplyDeleteYou supply reasons why "If there is this enormous increase in drug overdose deaths, this would be why." But that is not the same as any evidence that they are that much higher but disguised as other deaths. Are you really thinking there are these drug OD's that are being called Covid deaths? Because while that isn't what you said by7 a long shot, that would be the natural conclusion from what you did say. Drug OD's were already rising before Covid and have continued to go up. I fully believe that some of those are deaths of isolation, joblessness, and despair because of both lockdowns and deaths of relatives and friends. But there is no indication that is producing 1/10th the numbers of overall deaths we are seeing.
ReplyDeleteThe much simpler explanation is that there has been a variant in Covid that behaved differently than the first one. That is such a close fit to the data of losing a million Americans that alternative theories have a tall order in displacing it. If there was a huge spike in other causes, local medical personnel, police, and fire would be reporting it. Rumors and complaints and 6pm news stories would be leaking out. Drug OD's, heart attacks, whatever. They aren't.
No, the data suggests these deaths are mostly not being called COVID deaths. The actuarial data says they're mostly non-COVID, but the specifics about what they are isn't in the data as presented in the articles. So I'm definitely not saying these are deaths being misclassified as COVID when they're really not COVID: they aren't being classed as COVID deaths, mostly, at all.
ReplyDeleteI'm speculating that much of it may be unintentional ODs because of the separate evidence that 18-45s suddenly have a new leading cause of death among that demographic, specifically, fentanyl overdoses.
Could it be a variant of COVID that isn't being tracked as COVID? Maybe; but there actuarial evidence we have says it's mostly non-COVID deaths among the 18-64 year old demographic, and that happens to track with the general evidence that suggests that COVID hasn't been very deadly to younger populations in a direct way. It also tracks with the fact that there has been this big spike in fentanyl cases (which even Snopes agrees is to be classified as a truth -- that's the link under 'suddenly' in the post).
It might be another COVID variation that is untracked and also very much more deadly to younger populations than the ones we can track. That's definitely not impossible, but nothing clearly points to such a variant existing.
And, just to be clear, I'm also not dismissing the idea that the vaccines may be very much more dangerous/deadly than we believe. There is intense social and political pressure on and in the medical and scientific communities as regards studying that issue; and very large sums of money being deployed by governments and vaccine manufactures to try to ensure that the 'safe/effective' narrative is not successfully challenged. Those twin pressures may be distorting our ability to find or see evidence that the vaccines are killing people directly.
ReplyDeleteHowever, just for those same reasons, that is speculative -- at least as speculative as the existence of another COVID variation that targets younger people in a more deadly way, but that we aren't tracking as COVID. The fentanyl overdoses are not speculative: there's clear evidence supporting them as the new leading cause of death 18-45.
The Economist has been running a project to track 'excess deaths' across multiple countries. These are the actual deaths in a time period compared with the 'expected' deaths based on recent history. For the US, the excess deaths number is 1029000, compared with an official count of Covid deaths of 779000.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
It should certainly be possible to reconcile these numbers with the insurance company numbers.
You're welcome to see what you can make of it. Here are 2019 actuarial tables from the Social Security Administration.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html
Their data won't, of course, be the same as the insurance companies -- those are dealing with a subset of Americans who have group life insurance. On the other hand, I would think that subset would be having better outcomes. The rest of the total set ought to be doing worse, not better, than those who are employed in jobs with benefits.
There is no way, absolutely none, that the TPTB are missing potential covid deaths- if these deaths had the slightest possibility of being due to covid, they would be yelling it from the Tower of Fear, just as they have been doing.
ReplyDeleteThey are likely a combination of drug OD, suicide, and "died unexpectedly" AKA vax injuries- someone I read did a count of their local obits over the last year- the number was up about 50%, and the average age was 8 years younger than the previous year.
The coverup on this is not due to trying to stop misinformation, but truth. Same as always.
I may have misunderstood the original argument in part. I will clarify that when I referred to deaths attributed to covid I did not mean those from the official total, but those attributed in the new proposed totals of this theory.
ReplyDeleteThe death rate in a demographic that wasn't dying much is very sensitive to small changes.
@ raven - the thing that you say is absolutely impossible is in fact true. You are saying that the facts must follow your theory about what bad people they are. I said from the beginning that there would be undercounts in some places and overcounts in others because of different rues and procedures about what counts. That is what happened. Some jurisdictions do not allow a death to be classified as covid without a positive death, even though everyone present is saying "Sure looks like covid to me." The excess deaths for the time period are over a million, with the announced covid total of 800K. Of the remaining causes that could explain the missing 200K, increases in drug overdose (already rising for other reasons) explain 6, maybe 8,000 of that. As there may have been some recent increase in the last few months, call it 10K out of 200 if you like. Suicide is up only marginally. Nothing else is up, leaving...covid as the explanation. Because there are no other credible causes. There are repeated claims that vaccinations are causing unexplained deaths that aren't being recorded, but they aren't showing up in the numbers. What is happening is the mirror image of what you accused, that people are attributing everything that looks suspicious to the vaccinations. But there aren't more of these deaths than usual, people are just saying that. We had a high-profile case here, a congressman's 15 y/o nephew who died in July shortly after receiving a vaccine. I know the family, went to school with the grandparents and saw them at reunion in October. They remain provaccine and the family does not blame it. But about a week later, small conservative local sites began asserting that it was definitely the vaccine that killed him and the family says so. This was simply not so. But it spread, and I had people tell me privately how worried they were whether their grandchildren should get the vaccine because "so many" were dying. They aren't. Those numbers aren't up.
I don't get how people keep thinking that the staff at their local ERs, ICUs, and nursing homes are somehow not knowing what covid looks like after all this time, and are somehow misattributing causes of death on a large scale.
I'll make a prediction: in flu season the death rate from cancer goes up--because the flu weakens the patient letting the cancer kill sooner than otherwise.
ReplyDeleteDo we see that?
Or to look at it another way, the cancer weakens the patient, who is then less able to mount an effective immune response against the infection. Or the patient fails to get effective treatment because he's too ill or the medical system is under too much pressure, either from real illness or from bureaucratic/political madness.
ReplyDeletePlausible. Are the numbers actually there? Not that I know of.
ReplyDeleteThere's an issue with finding the numbers for that hypothesis, which is that 'flu season' is tracked only in winter. The flu may actually be bad in a given summer, but it's not going to show up in the numbers. (COVID, being tracked year round, gives us a more alarming picture; if we also only tracked it in the wintertime, we would say that this winter is half as bad as last winter in terms of deaths. Because it is tracked year-round, we have a much more alarming picture of never-ending waves. Yet the flu might also look like that if we tracked it differently. What you measure determines a lot about what you find.)
ReplyDeleteThat said, it is generally true that more people die in winter than summer. If the hypothesis that the flu is worse in the winter holds, then the numbers do suggest that there is at least a correlation with higher deaths per hypothesis.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/07/10/more-people-die-winter-summer-14146
I don't think the numbers are there for much of this, so the trick now is to make sure we're positing as many theories as will still fit the imperfect state of our knowledge, so we'll know what to investigate and won't rush to any unwarranted conclusions. It's the certainty that one unproven theory is superior to other unproven theories that drives much of the anxiety, bullying, and rancor. It's very uncomfortable not to know, with so much at stake, and easy to look for people to blame for our discomfort. It's how pogroms start, and relationships unravel.
ReplyDeleteMy sister sends me endless texts: she's worried she's about to be ill, or someone she cares about is about to be ill, but there are no symptoms yet and it's no longer possible to get tests. Or someone she knows actually is ill, or has to work extra shifts because someone else is ill, and in every case she confidently ascribes the illness to some particular failing. One friend couldn't join an event because she caught COVID when she went to the doctor to get a skin cancer removed. She's worried about having to work in the office rather than from home because she's sure that many clients coming in the door are not vaccinated--though she herself is vaccinated and recently boosted. The friend who caught a case had minor symptoms, but they could have been worse.
Not much about this is looking at things have actually happened. It sure isn't about sorting through the difference between causation and correlation, always a difficult thing, but worse when we forget how difficult it is. In times of anxiety, we demand heavy proof of some things and barely any for others, when sometimes there's not much proof on any side, and we have no choice but to admit there are things we don't know, can't predict accurately, and can't necessarily prevent. We can't even establish that there's one true strategy for facing the problem that everyone must join in or risk letting down the side.