1/ The question of how many excess deaths the US has had this year turns out to be tricky (no surprise) - and to point toward an answer that should make us very worried about the long-term effects of lockdowns.

The chart below shows US deaths from 2000-2018...

2/ Over time, deaths will tend to rise as the population grows and ages. But the chart makes clear that 2009 marked a major change in American mortality - between 2000 and 2009, the number of deaths barely changed. Since then, they're up by 400,000 annually...

3/ Two obvious factors played a role - the Great Recession and the explosion of opioid use. SOCIETAL DESPAIR KILLS. Now, where a demographer wants to say deaths "should" have been in 2020 is slightly tricky - anywhere from 2.9 million to almost 3 million is plausible...

4/ The difference may seem small, but it really isn't, because the higher figure suggests that an additional 100,000 or so of our reported #Covid deaths came in people who were so sick they would have died this year anyway...

5/ My best guess at this point is that we will have roughly 150,000 "from" Covid deaths this year, 150,000 "with" Covid deaths, 25,000 or so deaths that have nothing to do with Covid but are classified that way, and 75,000 lockdown deaths. But these are VERY round numbers...

6/ They are directionally accurate but each pool could be off by 50%. Our counting rules combined with the way PCR tests to pick up old cases mean we will need years of sorting through death certificates to get an honest answer.