Despite 'Delta' Alarmism, US COVID Deaths Are at Lowest Level Since March 2020, Harvard and Stanford Professors Explain
Far more people were dying from COVID-19 months ago as we were winding down restrictions than are dying today as some call to reinstate them.
By Bradley Polumbo Published on July 29, 2021
Despite ‘Delta’ Alarmism, US COVID Deaths Are at Lowest Level Since March 2020, Harvard and Stanford Professors Explain | The Stream
If you judged the US's current COVID-19 situation only by the headlines, you'd come away thinking that we're spiraling back into pandemic disaster. Localities like Los Angeles County and St. Louis have reimposed mask mandates on their citizens, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just revised its "guidance" to say that, actually, fully vaccinated individuals should still wear masks in certain situations. Meanwhile, mainstream media coverage of the rise of the "Delta variant" is soaked in alarmism.
Yet at the same time that all this alarm is mounting, the actual number of COVID-19 deaths is at a nadir. Harvard Medical School Professor Martin Kulldorff pointed this out on Twitter, writing that
"In [the] USA, COVID mortality is now the lowest since the start of the pandemic in March 2020."
That's right: despite all the
alarmism and clamor for renewed
restrictions on our liberty, there's
not really been a resurgence in the state of the COVID-19 crisis itself.
He shared this graph from
Our World In Data which clearly shows how COVID deaths per million are at,
relatively speaking, extreme lows. Far more people were dying from COVID-19 months ago as we were winding down restrictions than are dying today as some call to reinstate them.....
...
The Rhetoric of "Emergency" and "Crisis"
Of course, proponents of big government and government officials themselves will be the last ones to acknowledge
the reality that the most dangerous phase of this pandemic has long since come to an end in the US. Why? Because the rhetoric of "
emergency" and "
crisis" is the government's favorite tool to use in expanding and maintaining its power over our lives.
'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded, as Nobel-Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek put it. And once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist.
Examples of this timeless truth abound throughout history up until present day: from the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II to the now-permanent infringements on our civil liberties after 9/11 to the sweeping expansion of government control during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But, whether politicians like it or not, the COVID-19 crisis is largely over. So don't fall for cynical arguments from power-hungry individuals who want their "emergency" powers to become permanent.