Every day, we hear about how lockdowns save lives. Take this Reuters fAcT-cHeCk as an example. What we don't hear about – at least not on Google, Facebook, or cable news, are data showing how overall mortality hasn't changed this year, how the vast majority of those dying are advanced in age with severe co-morbidities, how positivity curves look the same in all states regardless of lockdowns, or how suicide and drug use is skyrocketing in over 40 states.
For the latter, we turn to San Fransisco, which has had one of the most strict and long-lasting runs of lockdown orders over the past year. San Fran has over 800,000 people within city limits and another 7 million or so in the Greater Bay Area.
Want to take a guess at how many have died from COVID-19? Considering that millions of people are currently being ordered to stay imprisoned in their homes, you'd think we're back in the age of the Bubonic Plague, where one out of every three neighbors has died.
As of the time of writing, the number is 176 people.
For perspective, San Fran proper had 29 traffic fatalities in 2019, along with 41 homicides (45 so far this year). In 2013, 46 people died specifically from jumping to their deaths off the Golden Gate Bridge. Looking at the wider Bay Area, over 10,600 people died in 2015 alone from cancer.
Yes, ICUs and hospitals are being stressed by sicker-than-usual patients due to the way COVID-19 creates breathing problems for certain at-risk demographics.
Regardless of that, 176 deaths in one of the nation's biggest cities is a statistical anomaly.
The lockdowns haven't decreased death numbers, as San Fran's case and mortality charts look the same as most other places of the nation, including states like South Dakota that didn't lockdown at all and places like Florida, Ohio, and Texas that did limited lockdowns in the spring.
Yet San Fran – which has already been struggling with rising poverty (over 10% of the city's population) due to insane leftist policies that are destroying the city – has remained intent on crushing the livelihoods of millions who will lose their jobs, businesses, homes, and sanity in perpetual lockdown.
One horrible cost of these government diktats is the skyrocketing number of overdose deaths in the city, with 621 so far in 2020.
This number has jumped significantly from 441 overdose deaths in 2019, which in turn had increased from 229 in 2018.
In addition, this number would have also been in the thousands if it were not for 2,610 doses of drug-blocking Narcan that were administered this year in overdose cases.
It's true that the overdose issue was already rising before COVID-19. The insanely addictive drug fentanyl has swept through the local drug market in recent years, as it has in many states. Still, the data show that lockdowns and subsequent isolation and financial destruction has taken that powder keg and exploded it in the worst possible ways.
Here's a visual metaphor for how these government policies are working:
As we continue with lockdowns into 2021 and the possible imposition of higher taxes and insane climate mandates by a Biden administration, you can be sure these numbers won't be going down anytime soon. Even if San Francisco doubles its COVID-19 deaths in a year to 352, it still won't come close to matching 2020's overdose deaths.
