Here’s a chart of mortality trends showing before and after covid.

Covid deaths have gone down, which is good (and this seems to be true for all age groups, last I checked) but what is alarming is the mortality rate for many other causes shot up in 2020 and just haven’t come down.

If you thought drivers got worse after the pandemic, you weren’t just imagining things.

And I don’t know if the US even has the capacity to measure any other negative health consequences aside from death and disability.

Increases in early adult mortality can signal population risks that may become more pronounced as these cohorts age. These results suggest the possibility of a worsening mortality crisis unless these trends are reversed. Policy solutions will require attention to the underlying causes of intensifying excess mortality among early adults (eg, opioid use, alcohol consumption, traffic safety, dietary risks). The 2 distinct phases of increasing mortality (before and after 2020) may also suggest the need to attend to ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic—which may be expressed in causes of death related to long-term consequences of infection, medical disruption, and social dislocation—and to deleterious health trends that predated it.

It would be interesting to see how this compares to the few countries which waited until the vaccines were available before they went YOLO.