This leads to a mystery: why did COVID-19 only start killing lots of people come spring 2020 if it had been hanging around quietly all winter?
Some sceptics argue that it's because Covid isn't really a more severe virus than flu, but the excess deaths were all caused by how we started responding to it in February and March 2020. For example, the overuse of ventilators particularly in New York City and the surrounding states in the first wave has been suggested by some to account for tens of thousands of additional deaths. However, while a ventilator panic in and around NYC will explain some of the additional deaths that spring, it wouldn't explain the deadly outbreaks elsewhere, or the deadly outbreaks that kept coming in subsequent waves even as the use of ventilators was scaled back.
The fact that deadly Covid outbreaks kept coming over the ensuing months and years is a powerful objection to the idea that what was causing most of the deaths was anything peculiar about the treatments used in, say, New York in March 2020. After all, many states including Florida had deadly waves during summer 2021 as the Delta variant surged. But Florida had not had a large wave the previous winter (despite famously ending its statewide restrictions in autumn 2020). It's clearly not the case that medics in Florida started going big on the ventilators again just as Delta appeared, and then stopped using them again afterwards. This is not an adequate explanation for the patterns of deaths we see. Early on there was a high level of variation in how many deaths occurred in different U.S. states, just as there was in different countries, for example, between Eastern and Western Europe. However, over time the number of excess deaths tended to converge, putting a limit on how much of the variation can be pinned on things specific to localities or time periods, such as poor treatment protocols early on in the north-eastern United States. ...<<<Read More>>>...
