I looked up the information in a previous thread. For the United States, using the most conservative Covid numbers, they outweighs these by at least a factor of 5.
Overdose and suicide are two of the leading causes of death among young people. If Covid deaths were 5X higher, we’d see a much much larger overall increase than 40%.
Edit: Your numbers are for the total population, not young people. The death rates and leading causes of death are drastically different between young people and the general population.
“The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319.”
I’m suggesting that other leading causes of death among people in this age range could possibly be up this year, and contributing to this uptick, perhaps by a significant amount.
For example, in SF, the number of people in this age range dying of overdoses far outnumbers the people in this age range dying of Covid. Nationally, we are setting record numbers of overdoses, driven mostly by fentanyl.
”In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in November that more than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, May 2020 to April 2021, with about three-quarters of those deaths involving opioids — a national record.” [0]
[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-202...
[1] https://vtdigger.org/2022/01/02/opioid-overdose-deaths-poise...
[2] https://www.wfmj.com/story/45563074/mercer-county-sees-recor...
[0] has no statistics on opioid deaths. [1] says that the deaths were going to be higher in Vermont, at (a projected) 200 deaths for the year vs 157 for the previous. That's maybe meaningful, but isn't limited to the age group the post parent was discussing. [2] Does not have year over year statistics to compare against. Just that it was the worst, and is drawing on a smaller sample size than [1].
If (and this kind of seems like a big if) Vermont is representative of the rest of the US, *and* the age group he was discussing then maybe you have one source that supports your claim that a large portion of the deaths are from additional opioid deaths.
On the other hand assuming the root of the increase of all cause mortality between 2019 and 2020 among adults is mostly uncorrelated with the pandemic is a tough thing to convince me of. Can you please provide a source showing the national increase of opioid overdoses and suicide between 2019 and 2020 among the 20-40 age group?
Note I agree entirely that there were more overdose deaths in the US in 2020 than 2019 (that's easy to source https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...) what is hard is breaking it down into these smaller nuggets that we're discussing.
ETA: I couldn't find the original NY Times article grand-grand-grand... parent talked about that got us down this path, but this is pretty convincing that all cause mortality increased by at least 45% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7376843/