Every politician who ordered a COVID lockdown is a killer. Vote the bastards out - Heart conditions drove spike in deaths beyond those attributed to covid-19 The coronavirus killed tens of thousands in the United States during the pandemic’s first months, but it also left a lesser-known toll: thousands more deaths than would have been expected from heart disease and a handful of other medical conditions, according to an analysis of federal data by The Washington Post. The analysis suggests that in five hard-hit states and New York City there were 8,300 more deaths from heart problems than would have been typical in March, April and May — an increase of roughly 27 percent over historical averages. That spike contributed to Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York state and the city having a combined 75,000 “excess deaths” during that period, 17,000 more than the number officially attributed to covid-19, the disease the virus causes. While several experts said some of the excess deaths in the analysis were almost certainly unrecognized fatalities from covid-19, the review suggests that many patients suffering from serious conditions died as a result of delaying or not seeking care as the outbreak progressed and swamped some hospitals. Normally, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. But in the early months of the pandemic, some hospital departments were nearly devoid of the heart, cancer, stroke and other patients who populated them before. Looking at the analysis, more than 50 patients a day “died excess deaths just from heart disease, just in New York City,” said John Puskas, chairman of cardiovascular surgery at Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital in Manhattan. “Frankly, that would explain where all the patients went.” The analysis of data from March 1 to May 30, using a model previously developed by the Yale School of Public Health, shows heart disease is the major driver of excess deaths, excluding those officially attributed to covid-19. As states in the South and West restart their economies and see new cases surge, the excess deaths should serve as a cautionary tale, said Nahid Bhadelia, medical director of Boston University School of Medicine’s Special Pathogens Unit. “This data underlines the importance of not letting our health systems get to the point where they are so overwhelmed that it spills over and affects people with other medical conditions in our community,” she said. The number of excess deaths in the United States during the pandemic far surpasses the number officially attributed to covid-19, analyses have shown. The official death counts from the disease are incomplete, according to experts, in part because it spread for weeks before testing was widely available and because the virus kills in a variety of ways that were not recognized early on. But several experts said the spikes in the causes of death in the new Post analysis suggested a deadly collateral effect of the pandemic. They said the surge in deaths from heart disease and several other conditions matches what they saw in clinics and hospitals and confirms their fears that many patients died after not seeking care. “This is in line with what we were scared of happening: that we were missing people beforehand and that people were dying of other diseases,” Bhadelia said. New York City, which reports its covid-19 statistics separately from the state, quickly became the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States and saw more than 4,700 excess deaths from heart disease — more than four times the number of any other jurisdiction The Post examined. Puskas said that even at the height of the outbreak, when his hospital was nearly overwhelmed by the pandemic response, it didn’t turn away anyone seeking heart care. Yet the number of cardiovascular patients showing up remained low, he said. Health-care providers everywhere are now reckoning with the consequences. “All those patients that would typically have been there having cardiovascular care were not there,” Puskas said. “Those who would’ve had emergency lifesaving care did not receive that care, and they then became one of the statistics on your chart.” In many cases, experts said, patients suffered through cardiac events, strokes, hyperglycemia and other health difficulties at home, likely fearful of seeking care in hospitals where large numbers of people suffering from covid-19 were receiving treatment. Between March 15 and May 23, visits to hospital emergency departments declined 23 percent for heart attacks, 20 percent for strokes and 10 percent for high-blood-sugar crises — a complication of diabetes — when compared with the previous 10 weeks, according to a report last month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The striking decline in ED visits for acute life-threatening conditions might partially explain observed excess mortality not associated with COVID-19,” the researchers wrote. And in a separate excess deaths analysis, the CDC estimated that since Feb. 1, between about 20,000 and 49,000 more people have died of all non-covid-19 causes than would be expected in a typical year. On Wednesday, an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association bolstered the findings from the Post and CDC analyses. The paper looked at excess deaths nationwide in March and April and found that 35 percent were attributed to causes other than covid-19. The researchers, led by a team at Virginia Commonwealth University, concluded that those deaths may include unreported, “nonrespiratory manifestations” of the virus, or they could represent “secondary pandemic mortality caused by disruptions in society that diminished or delayed access to health care.” The emerging understanding of the collateral toll signals the fallout that America’s new hot spots could face in coming weeks and also suggests the backlog in health-care problems that hospitals and other caregivers will face once the pandemic subsides. “We are waiting for this cloud of coronavirus to lift more fully so we can see what’s happened to our patients,” said Gregory Piazza, a cardiovascular specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “Are we going to see a flood of new patients that have decreased left heart function because they’ve had a missed myocardial infarction? Are we going to see more patients with heart failure? “We’re certainly preparing, in the cardiovascular community, to run double speed to accommodate all the things we’ve put off, that have been backing up all this time,” he said. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/investigations/coronavirus-excess-deaths-heart/