In some years, deaths exceed projections, for instance in a bad flu year. These extra deaths are characterized as “excess deaths.”

In February, the CDC reported it attributed 376,504 deaths in 2020 to COVID-19. Each death is regrettable, but to put that number in perspective, the COVID deaths in 2020 were actually lower than the 401,000 excess deaths in 2017 — a bad flu year.

This finding mirrors excess death data from other countries, where excess deaths were also higher in 2017 than in 2020.

A recent research paper in the prestigious journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, points out these statistics and then an even more surprising claim:

“The comparison is more striking when years of life lost (YLL) is the measure used. Goldstein and Lee (11) estimate that the mean loss of life years for a person dying from COVID-19 in the United States is 11.7 y. Multiplying 377,000 decedents by 11.7 y lost per decedent gives a total of 4.41 M years of life lost to COVID-19 in 2020, only a third of the 13.02 million life years lost to excess mortality in the United States in 2017 (Table 1). The reason that the comparison is so much sharper for YLL than for excess deaths is that COVID-19 deaths in 2020 occurred at much older ages, on average, than the excess deaths of 2017.”

In other words, while more than 4 million years of life were lost in 2020, more than 13 million were lost in 2017. This echoes what many experts have been saying for months — COVID is comparable to a severe flu that disproportionately affects old people, but is less dangerous for young people even than the flu.

Some might claim COVID deaths would have been much worse without lockdowns and mask mandates. There is increasing evidence, however, that these non-pharmaceutical interventions had little or no effect on COVID mortality.

Read full story here: Source: COVID Deaths — Putting the Numbers in Perspective • Children’s Health Defense