First off, I’m not a crazy Democrat who wore a mask during the COVID years except when I had to in order to enter a business, and I don’t believe they worked at all unless they were N95 and worn properly. The problem with that is the people who wore those took them off just long enough to get infected, usually by a friend or family member. 99.99% of the masks worn by people did not work properly as needed to contain the spread of the virus.

I also knew that the odds of catching a typical airborne virus like the common cold or the flu via a contaminated surface were infantessimal, almost non-existant unless an infected person coughed into their hand, rubbed something, then you lick that surface almost immediately thereafter. The common cold, the flu and COVID are all airborne transmitted 99.99% of the time.

Shutting down any businesses over COVID was a tremendous mistake that will be borne out by history in the long run. They tried that with the Spanish Flu in the 1920s & again with Polio for 50 years thru the 1950s & it didn’t work with them either. Look at all the gyms & theaters & entertainment businesses that were destroyed by the shutdowns and the lives of the people connected to them that were shattered, and most of it was done for political purposes & borne of ignorance.

Look at all the money wasted by the gov’t through COVID handouts. We’re talking trillions of dollars. Look at all the inflation & supply chain problems caused by it. Our response to COVID is something I hope is never repeated by any society ever.

Now that I’ve established my position on COVID, which is thouroughly Republican & Libertarian, there is something that some of my bretheren on this side of the fence need to know & believe, and I’ll prove it with 1 stat that can’t be argued against . . .

COVID was real, and it killed a lot of people that otherwise wouldn’t have died. I’ll tell you why, but let me first discuss the facts about COVID deaths.

It’s true that many people who died from a COVID infection didn’t die from the infection itself, but from the fatal side effects of having the infection. That;’s why a lot of people who died where old, overweight, diabetic or sickly, as in cancer patients and those with compromised immune systems, many times from the drugs they were using to combat another illness. Some drugs that combat illnesses also lower your immune response and leave you vulnerable to illness from other sources. I had a friend who was taking a med for a toenail infection and got a staph infection because the med lowered his immune response & he almost died.

However, just because they died from the side effects doesn’t mean that COVID didn’t kill them. These are people who wouldn’t have died had they not contracted COVID, so COVID is at least the underlying cause of death, if not the main cause, and it’s still a COVID death. If you’re a hemophiliac, you might die if you are injured and bleed to death, but it’s not the hemophilia that killed you — it’s the injury that killed you, as you can live with hemophilia if you don’t get injured. What killed you was the injury, not the hemophilia.

Here’s the proof — let’s start In 2010. That year, 2.468 million people died, and it was expected as that’s the number of people who died the previous year plus a small expected percentage increase caused by an increase in population and/or an increase in flu-related deaths, which fluctuate pretty wildly from year to year. Some years the flu deaths are maybe 20,000 and then expand to 80,000 the next year. The US death toll increased every year from 2010 onward as it did before that. The increases are typically an average of 42,000 per year, and range from a low of 15,000 to as much as 86,000, which are flu-related.

In 2019, 2.854 million died. In 2020, the death rate increased 535,000 over the 2019 total to 3.390 million. Those extra deaths had to be caused by something, and it was COVID. In 2021, the increase was 552,000 more than 2019 to 3.417 million. In 2022, COVID incidence declined greatly and it was 3.271 million that year, which is an increase of 417,000 from 2019, but if you realive that we had increases in deaths of as much as 69,000 in 2017 & 86,000 in 2015, it seems that a bad flu year would be maybe add 70,000 more deaths over the normal increase of 15,000 per year (the low annual increase in 2019), so deducting that figure from the pre-COVID increase of 417,000, then adjusting for population increases means that the COVID-related 2022 deaths were probably closer to a 100,000 excess vs average 475,000 excess in 2020 & 2021. Keep in mind that 2022 total deaths were appx 120,000 less than 2021, and net population increased appx 2 million per year in non-COVID years.

COVID is & was real. There is no other logical explanation to account for the death rates experienced during the COVID years.

Will we have another global pandemic soon? I don’t think so as we’ve learned how to contain them better, and these global infections are pretty rare. We had them in 1958, 1968 & 2009 as flu outbreaks, the worst was the 1918 outbreak. I don’t think we’ll see something on the magnitude of COVID ever again with what we’ve learned, and nothing will come close for probably another 100 years.