Alarming even insurance companies, something has driven the death rate up 40 percent among working Americans within a one-year period, and it’s not COVID-19.
As we’ve seen over the past two years, data and statistics can be manipulated and skewed in a wide variety of ways.
One of the most reliable data points we have is all-cause mortality. It’s very hard to massage that statistic, as people are either dead or they’re not. Their inclusion in the national death index database is based on one primary criteria—they’ve died—regardless of the cause.
From there, their cause of death, as identified on their death certificate, is added in to more granular statistics, such as the number of people who died from cancer and heart disease in any given year, for example. But while the cause of any given death can be manipulated and altered, the fact that there was a death is more certain. What’s more, death rates tend to be very stable.
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business … death rates are up 40 percent over what they were prepandemic.” ~ Scott Davidson, CEO of OneAmerica
As noted in a (not peer-reviewed) study led by scientist Denis Rancourt, who looked at U.S. mortality between March 2020 and October 2021, “All-cause mortality by time is the most reliable data for detecting true catastrophic events causing death, and for gauging the population-level impact of any surge in deaths from any cause.”