COVID-19 and Suicide: Can the Official Death Toll Be Believed?
Originally published on Medium 8 April 2021
The Covid-19 pandemic has served as the justification for fear-mongering and restrictions on human liberty unparalleled in the peacetime history of any society in the past one hundred years. Concomitant with this there has been a rise in joblessness, homelessness, alcohol consumption, depression, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation, along with prescriptions for antidepressants. All of these are risk factors for completed suicides. There was every reason to expect the suicide rate would go up in 2020.
Well, according to the latest US government figures, it didn’t.
The 31 March issue of JAMA featured a report from two CDC researchers titled “The Leading Causes of Death in the US for 2020.” According to these researchers, there were approximately 500,000 excess deaths in the United States last year. 345,323 of these deaths were attributed to Covid-19, with the remainder due to other causes. But perhaps the most surprising finding reported in the paper was that suicide deaths went down in 2020, with 2,677 fewer deaths compared to 2019.
How can this be?
The data table for the JAMA paper gives us a hint. The number of deaths listed in the category “unintentional injuries” rose by 19,136 compared to the previous year — a figure that dwarfs the reported decrease in suicides. How many of these “unintentional” deaths were actually suicides?
Officials may have found other ways to hide suicides. As of 7 April 2021, the CDC had recorded 539,723 deaths due to Covid-19. Of these, 10,666 had “intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning, and other adverse events” listed as a contributing factor — again, a figure that dwarfs the claimed decrease in suicides.
All this raises a number of questions.
How many citizens have been pushed over the edge to suicide by our society’s panicky, scared response to the covid? How many of those deaths have been hidden under the anodyne label “unintentional injuries?” Worse, how many have been wrongly attributed to the virus? Will the inflated death then be used as justification for further restrictions on our liberties? And what does it say about our society that nobody who is in a position to do so seems interested in finding out?