Mortality related impacts of Covid-19, US & Comparable EU Nations
The United States has experienced significantly higher Covid-19 related death rates and higher excess all-cause mortality, compared with peer OECD countries since the start of the pandemic. The excess all-cause mortality metric, measured during successive waves of the pandemic, estimate indirect causes of death, such as the lack of access to or the limited availability of healthcare related services. Excess mortality, in the US, is ~30% of the values attributed to direct Covid-19 related mortality, since the start of the pandemic.
Multiple failures in our healthcare system are directly responsible for these unfortunate outcomes. Notable, at the technical level ,was the failure of the CDC to follow its own manufacturing guidelines to develop a test to confirm infection status, in Spring 2020.
Please see attached link for information regarding the June 19, 2020, HHS memo “Summary of the Findings of the Immediate Office of the General Counsel’s Investigation Regarding CDC’s Production of COVID-19 Test Kits”.
Specifically, “… findings of the Office of the General Counsel (OGC) regarding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) manufacturing of the initial COVID-19 test kits that could not be validated by public health laboratories in early February.”
As a nation with a capitalistic and profit oriented system of healthcare, supply chains were overwhelmed by the sudden demand for items like face masks. Similarly, confused communications regarding the need for masks, by the public, and the lack of availability of these masks, added to widespread distrust and dismay.
By the time mRNA vaccines became available, in late 2020, political ideology became the basis to assess whether the rushed development of this technology made them unsafe. Luckily, large scale studies, both in our country and around the world, have demonstrated that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are quite safe and also very effective at controlling the severity of subsequent Covid-19 infections.
Recent research (2022) suggests that ~10% of the biomedical doctors (MDs) in the US are vaccine skeptics. Their rhetoric, on social media, has not helped our public health objectives.
Within the US, the severity of Covid-19 related health impacts have been directly linked to lower vaccination rates, as suggested by the comparison of similar metrics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations of comparable Socioeconomic status (SES). 