Mortality data of the past four years show a wave of deadly cardiovascular and metabolic illness.
From 2020 to 2022, a quarter of a million more Americans over 35 years old succumbed to cardiovascular disease than predicted based on historical trends, according to Bloomberg analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2023, age-adjusted stroke mortality was almost 5% above pre-pandemic levels, according to preliminary data, while rates from deaths related to hypertensive heart disease, rhythm abnormalities, blood clots, diabetes and kidney failure were 15-28% higher. Covid had a muted impact on other common causes of death such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, the data show.
“The cardiometabolic aftereffects of SARS-CoV-2 have been profound, persistent, and peculiar — really peculiar,” said cardiologist Susan Cheng, director of public health research at Cedars-Sinai’s Smidt Heart Institute in Los Angeles.
vaxxed?
Greater immunity and the emergence of less severe variants have since lowered the incidence of deadly complications, but the problem hasn’t gone away. Each coronavirus infection a person experiences, no matter how mild, might be acting like its own cardiovascular risk factor, she said. The longer-term effects are even more mysterious.
Doctors in the article are puzzled about if the cause is because Americans are too fat, or "the lockdowns" (not the hospitals being flooded with sick people for months at a time) caused people to avoid doctors, while noting that the healthcare system itself broke down and has made it harder for people to find care in the first place ever since. Could it be that these "less severe" variants are still causing heart problems? Gosh, maybe, but it's just a big ol' puzzle and no one can be sure of anything yet.
threads on this article are full of people describing the new heart conditions they developed after getting covid.
This shit is infuriating. I read this and based on all the information presented in here, covid is squarely to blame. Yet everyone they quote just seems to throw up their hands and go "well who can really say." The two things they do blame are obesity (which makes no sense based on the information presented in the article, and they even present information that contradicts this) and lockdowns (which does make sense, except they do no analysis-they blame lockdowns without realizing that our failed response is the reason lockdowns turned out how they did). The one place they do present some really good information and seem ready to finally admit covid is causing the increase, they turn around and quote some Australian actuary (which...what? Surely there's better people to comment on a public health crisis) who says "yeah it's really impossible to know" and that's the conclusion to that section. Absolutely horrible article. Anything to draw attention away from our continuing failed response to covid.
I find it odd they say "well people stopped going to the doctor because of lockdowns". Motherfuckers in 2015 people were doing frontier medicine because going to the hospital was like $2000.
I definitely leveled up at least once in medical on myself
They frame it as if it was some unhealthy anxiety over infection, completely ignoring how many people were dying during the worst of it and that doctors were forced to ration care.