The invisible deaths of Covid-19

Fred Chong Rutherford
4 min readNov 15, 2021

876,664 deaths from Covid-19. There’s a statistic that the CDC has been tracking for a long time, which is basically this. You add up the number of people who died. You do this for a few years. You then draw a curve to ‘predict’ how many people die the next year.

876,664 more people have died than the predicted curve of deaths due to Covid-19 since February 2020. 385,326 is the official CDC count for 2020. 371,636 is the official CDC count for 2021. The rest are people who died indirectly due to Covid-19.

Will our country truly reckon with what’s happening, and work to ensure this never happens here again?

756,962 official deaths from Covid-19 so far in the U.S., 119,702 related to Covid-19. Like, a hospital gets filled up, so a patient can’t get treatment. Where does that patient go?

There’s also an assumption about those deaths, that they’ve all been counted accurately. What if the count is skewed because a governor wants to “make their state’s Covid-19 numbers look better?” New York did that with nursing home deaths, Florida did that with EVERY death, so did Texas and a few others.

The population of Seattle, Washington is 724,305. The population of Bellevue, Washington is 144,403. Both figures are as of 2019. It’s as if the entire population of those two cities vanished.

2.59 million people live in Brooklyn. 2.29 million live in Queens. Manhattan is 1.69 million. 1.44 million live in the Bronx. And 0.44 million live in Staten Island. Imagine coming to New York, and finding Staten Island empty of people. Then you go into Manhattan and realize that everything below 14th street is empty, too.

That’s the scale of the deaths so far. I don’t know what it’s going to take for people to see this and acknowledge it. But I find a lot of the political discourse happening right now absurd. Republican in Congress, almost every…