There has been talk on here about suicide rates increasing due to the pandemic. Nobody has actually posted any data on this yet , however this popped up on my Twitter feed this morning.
Suicide Deaths during the Stay-at-Home Advisory in Massachusetts.
Its only one state, but I'd be curious to see if this is the exception or the rule.
I’m not a proponent of suggesting suicide rates are up or not. I don’t think people go from happy and content to suicidal based on quarantine and lockdowns. I believe if they commit suicide, it is likely they have other issues that may be triggered by the Pandemic restrictions but they’d most likely be triggered by other issues of the day regardless.
The real issue is the clinics that were shut down for three months. Things like cancer screenings, scopes, Cardiac testing and other deadly disease/illness testing not being readily available for three months have done far more damage than suicide. The problem is we have not seen much death from this yet.
Of course, someone in need of Cardiac testing that ended up dying from a heart attack has been a statistic that can be tracked. But, if you were scheduled for a Colonoscopy and ended up having it rescheduled for four months later because that clinic was shit down, your Colon Cancer may have had a 4 month delay in diagnosis. Those people have not passed yet. They will.
When this is all over and they do the data analysis, they will do an excess deaths analysis over the next couple years. We will see massive excess deaths over the next couple years well above the recorded Covid deaths. This is inevitable. People will die earlier because of lack of access to health care.
To be clear, this isn’t about someone scared to go to a hospital when they have a heart attack. Emergency services have been available the entire time. I am talking about patient screening and diagnosis. People will have treatment delayed because their diagnosis will have been delayed. Those delays will be the difference between life and death for a lot of people.
