Pandemic concerns hide other tragedies CHRIS CHURCHILL
Contact columnist Chris Churchill at 518454-5442 or email cchurchill@ tmesunion. com
TAlbany imothy Cavanaugh, a coroner in Albany County for 34 years, has never seen a year like this one — and doesn’t want to see another like it.
The coroner’s office, Cavanaugh told me, is on pace to handle a record number of autopsies, and, contrary to what you might expect, the increase he’s experiencing has nothing to do with COVID -19 deaths. Generally speaking, the county coroner doesn’t handle coronavirus-related deaths, he said.
Instead, the increase in autopsies is driven by an increase in homicides, suicides and drug overdoses.
“COVID has kind of put everything else on the back burner,” Cavanaugh said. “But the amount of young people we’re losing to heroin this year is really alarming.”
In a typical year, the county coroner’s office performs 220 to
Albany County Coroner Timothy Cavanaugh, front left, says there have been an alarming number of homicides, suicides and drug overdoses during the coronavirus pandemic. The county expects to perform over 300 autopsies this year.
240 autopsies. So far this year, it has performed 255, Cavanaugh said, and expects to be over 300 by year’s end.
What accounts for the increase? Cavanaugh wasn’t sure.
But homicide rates have spiked in cities around the country, and many public health experts nationally have been sounding alarms on apparent increases in overdoses and suicides — often called deaths of despair — since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
I’d caution against drawing firm conclusions. Correlation does not imply causation. We can’t say for certain that what Cavanaugh is seeing results directly from the pandemic or its economic shocks.
Still, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which estimates there have been nearly 94,000 NON-COVID “excess deaths” this year, is among the groups sounding the alarm on “considerably elevated adverse mental health conditions” during the pandemic.
In one CDC survey, 11 percent of all respondents said they had “seriously considered” suicide recently. For those aged 18 to 24, the number was one in four — a terrifying statistic.
Reams of other data suggest American happiness has plummeted amid a wave of anxiety and depression, which perhaps isn’t surprising. In much of the country, the economy has been destroyed by the coronavirus and government-imposed lockdowns. Millions of Americans remain worried over how they’ll pay bills and feed their children. The fear is real.
As it happens, concern about impacts of the pandemic and governmentimposed restrictions was the focus of a proposal authored and signed in western Massachusetts over the weekend. “The Great Barrington Declaration,” as it’s called, argues that governments may be doing more harm than good.
“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short- and long-term public health,” wrote three epidemiologists — Martin
Kulldorff from Harvard University, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University. “The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health — leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.”
The document, cosigned as of Wednesday afternoon by more than 7,500 health scientists and medical practitioners, argues that people should live as normally as possible in the face of the virus while taking extreme care to protect the most vulnerable. It’s a “herd immunity” proposal essentially, akin to how Sweden has approached the virus.
“Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice,” the Declaration, well, declares. “Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”
The Great Barrington Declaration is controversial, not surprisingly. After all, it is diametrically in opposition to the advice of most public health officials and the approach taken by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other politicians.
David Holtgrave, dean of the University at Albany School of Public Health, is among those who will not sign it. In an email, Holtgrave said the idea that younger populations can live normally while older populations are protected “is quite flawed public thinking.”
“It tends to ignore the potential for young persons to transmit to older populations,” Holtgrave wrote, later adding that “COVID -19 is too serious to simply throw caution to the wind and hope for the best.”
I won’t get in the middle of a debate between public health experts. But I will at least credit the Great Barrington authors for attempting to spotlight the hidden tragedies of the coronavirus pandemic — the horrors that Timothy Cavanaugh is seeing more than ever.