No, 140,000 is not particularly a lot for a semi-novel virus, especially when you look at the populations dying from it (at least half of these deaths are people at death's door. That doesn't mean their lives don't matter, but it does mean that, it's not necessarily something unique about COVID-19 that killed them)

You should know that the way we classify deaths is highly suspect, but my argument doesn't hinge on that so assume all the deaths are legit.

> Isn't the fact that you can visibly SEE excess deaths, greater than previous years' trends, concerning?

As for excess deaths, assuming those are COVID-19 deaths is foolish. More people die every year from cardiac events than have died thus far from COVID-19 (and likely that will still hold by the end of this year for an apples-to-apples comparison); it stands to reason that many of those deaths are from cardiovascular disease, amplified by the unprecedented suspension of elective surgeries and preventative care, not to mention how afraid of going to the hospital people are.

BTW, go look at 2019 all-cause mortality compared to 2020 all-cause mortality. They're almost identical. So no, statistically this is not something super crazy.

^ Seriously, go actually look at that data. You will probably be shocked. I was.

Likewise, hundreds of health-care workers losing their lives isn't very surprising. Although in general I don't like to 'rebut' news articles because they don't give much that's actually rebuttable.

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BTW, I've said this elsewhere but probably not on this thread yet:

Given COVID-19 kills the very old and spares the very young, once it has passed through the population, deaths in subsequent years will be nearly non-existent. Why? Because the set of COVID-19-naive individuals (of those who can actually get infected, since many cannot due to cross reactivity) becomes dominated by new entrants to the world, e.g. babies/toddlers. The same individuals who are virtually incapable of dying from COVID-19. Therefore unlike Flu, which apart from its ability to mutate is responsible for significant recurring death, COVID-19 will not have significant recurring death. Thus amortized over many years, the numbers look even better than they do now. And I know this sounds hard to believe, but the numbers to me look really good.

I believe our policy of lockdown has certainly increased all-cause mortality - I consider that inarguable - but furthermore, I think it is very likely that our policies have put our bodies into a state where we suffer worse outcomes from COVID-19. This is due to people staying inside and therefore not getting sun exposure, with vitamin d and to a much lesser extent nitric oxide playing INCREDIBLE roles in the outcomes of respiratory diseases (the magnitude of effect size shocked me w/ vitamin D), lack of exercise due to gym closures etc, social isolation which has been shown to increase death apart from the feeling of emotional loneliness (i.e. even if you take away peoples' emotional loneliness they still die more), lack of sleep and general life disruption attributable to unemployment and the "new normal", etc. I could go on, but really I should step away now before I spend hours in this thread...