COVID was fourth leading cause of death in 2022, CDC data shows

Over the summer I have been interested in the columns written by Joel Achenbach. Achenbach is a writer for the Washington Post on subjects that pertain to science and politics, particularly topics such as COVID-19, space, and even plants. While Joel Achenbach mainly gives facts and data to support what he is talking about, he often presents only certain facts that support what he is talking about to persuade you to follow his beliefs. Overall, it was fun reading his articles though, and they were very informative. The article he wrote for the Washington Post titled, “Covid Was the Fourth Leading Cause of Death in 2022, CDC Data Shows” gives us good insight into how he is as a writer and what bias he presents.

Joel Achenbach wants to inform us of all the numbers provided by the CDC to show us the main reasons people are dying, but we have to look behind the numbers to see the bias and what he is trying to persuade us of. In the article, he mentions that heart disease, cancer, and “unintentional injury” were the three leading causes of death in 2022. While the death rate in 2022 was overall lower than in 2021, the three leading causes actually increased the number of deaths. This is where the bias comes into play. Achenbach suggests that much of our research efforts in 2022 went to “curing” Covid and thus halted the process of the research for the other causes of death, which made them get worse. What could have been done about this? There was a debate for a while about letting a virus “take its course” and “weed out” the people that are vulnerable thus getting rid of the virus. Achenbach supported this concept and writes about how a Yale medical professional thinks that this stall has ultimately reversed some of the progress in the medical field, and the CDC numbers agree. This would help medical professionals keep the numbers lower for cancer, heart disease, and unintentional injury. The vaccine created from this pandemic may have saved some lives by helping your body fight the disease, but was it enough to have let go of valuable progress towards “solutions” for the other three leading causes of death?

Finally, we learn a valuable lesson from this article. As Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, says, “This may represent further evidence that the health of Americans continues to decline despite the enormous sum we spend on health care.” This teaches us that we can’t rely on hospitals to fix all of our problems and we need to take care of ourselves.

Discussion question: Do you think that what we (America) did in response to Covid was appropriate? Do you think we could have done anything better?