Those sort of arguments are always made in bad faith. Is it surprising that <arbitrary infectious disease> was lower during the pandemic, in the midst of unprecedented lockdowns and mask mandates? Absolutely not.
The same goes for any argument that claims that COVID deaths were simply mis-classified to take advantage of special hospital reimbursements, and that people were really just dying of the standard flu. It takes almost no effort to show that the ALL-CAUSE risk of dying in America was excessively high during the pandemic years, which turns their argument from "they're just reclassifying flu deaths" into "there's a global conspiracy to submit extra death certificates for fictional people." [1][2][3][4]
jachriga|2 years ago
The same goes for any argument that claims that COVID deaths were simply mis-classified to take advantage of special hospital reimbursements, and that people were really just dying of the standard flu. It takes almost no effort to show that the ALL-CAUSE risk of dying in America was excessively high during the pandemic years, which turns their argument from "they're just reclassifying flu deaths" into "there's a global conspiracy to submit extra death certificates for fictional people." [1][2][3][4]
[1] Age-adjusted mortality up to 2018 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends...)
[2] Age-adjusted mortality for 2019 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-08-508.pdf)
[3] Age-adjusted mortality for 2020-2021 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db456.pdf)
[4] Provisional age-adjusted mortality for 2022 (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7218a3.htm)
And for easy consumption of that data: https://imgur.com/a/zFYICrt