COVID tracker: After three full years, the pandemic’s toll continues

By DAVID BROOKS

Monitor staff

Published: 02-26-2023 4:43 PM

It has been three full years of pandemic-era carnage in New Hampshire.

“Carnage” is a little strong, perhaps. It’s more like a slow, steady increase in the number of New Hampshire residents who die, day in and day out, since our first official COVID-19 case was reported on March 2, 2020.

I’m talking about deaths from all causes: all illnesses, accidents, drug overdoses, murder, suicide, anything. If there’s a death certificate involved, it gets counted by the CDC.

Based on that CDC data, the state averaged 34.0 deaths every day during the three pre-pandemic years of 2017 through 2019, but averaged 37.8 deaths every day during the pandemic years of 2020 through 2022.

That’s an 11% increase: An average of 3.8 more deaths each day in New Hampshire since the SARS-CoV2 virus showed up.

About two-thirds of those extra deaths were due to the virus, according to New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services. DHHS counted 2,855 official COVID deaths by the end of 2022, a number that experts say would have been much higher without the fast rollout of vaccines and boosters.

But what about the rest? If it wasn’t the COVID virus, what caused the other 1,638 excess deaths?

There are plenty of possibilities: Delayed health care, despair over an upended economy, effects of isolation, loosening social bonds, less care taken with vehicles and guns and other dangerous items. They’re all plausible and none can be fixed with a new vaccine; it will, as the saying goes, take a village.

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As for COVID-19, it’s still here. We, thankfully, haven’t seen a big surge in cases this winter like we did in the previous two but on the other hand we haven’t seen a big decline, either.

COVID hospitalization numbers in New Hampshire, the most reliable indicator these days, have bounced around over the past 11 months (they’re on the downward trend at the moment) but have never gone down to the low numbers seen in earlier summers. It feels like the disease is settling in for a very long haul.

Meanwhile there are plenty of other diseases out there waiting to have their moment in the sun. Of particular concern is the way avian flu appears to be migrating to mammals and possibly to people.

So don’t put away your masks just yet.

And don’t despair. We’ll get through this together.

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