Isn’t COVID likely to be the #1 killer of most professions in 2020/2021, since most professions are mercifully not that dangerous anymore?
LEO isn’t in the top 10 of the life threatening profession list in US, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-i.... I’d wager COVID was also the #1 killer of retail clerks, florists, and probably software engineers for the last two years as well.
You are correct. IIRC, LEOs are around #16 after loggers, fishermen, and bartenders.
But considering the amount of push back on vaccine mandates, including threats of walkouts and mass retirement, the effects of politicizing the vaccine and COVID in general are truly stunning. This is what was significant about this to me.
edit: I see your edit with the source now, thanks.
It seems like the other most common killers, heart disease and cancer, tend to take you out with more predictability and on a longer time scale (barring surprise heart attacks). I would expect that a large percentage of people dying of these diseases leave their jobs (voluntarily or laid off) before they die of it, making them less common causes of death for active professionals.
On the other hand, covid hits people fast and hard. One day you're fine and working and the next week you're on a ventilator, so these deaths are more likely to happen to people still actively employed.
And we see exactly this reflected in this data. There were 15 heart attacks and no reported cancer deaths, and 231 covid deaths in 2021, even though the overall death rate of covid is comparable to those two.
Nobody stays on the job when they know they have a few months left to live.
Cops are worshipped by society because "they put their life on the line". This, like the link you shared, should disabuse people of that notion. Unfortunately it will change nothing.
Also revenue generation via citations and civil asset forfeiture, which is asset seizure without due process that is highly abused by many departments to supplement budgets.
If I am doing the numbers right, the overall US COVID death rate is ~2200 per 100K and LEOs are 476 from that site out of (from other sources) about 700K, which is 68 per 100K.
Which initially makes LEOs look like they are doing quite well, but I suspect its quite bad once you correct for age demographics of the population and the law enforcement profession. There aren't a lot of cops in the age groups with the highest COVID-19 death rates...
Then its a high contact profession that has been highly resistant to every control measure (to the point of actively sabotaging enforcement in many places where they were responsible for it), so its not at all surprising that they would be hard hit.
CA had 0.06 cases per capita [since Jan 1 2021], TX is at 0.07. "LEO density" doesn't offset this enough either, so there has to be some reporting error.
The average age of death from Covid in the US is higher than the average age of overall death. So I don’t think it applies everywhere. I think occupations that don’t encounter so many people probably have a lower death rate.
Is this from COVID, or “with COVID”? Makes sense that professions dealing directly with random members of the public would be more likely to get infected.
I don't want to minimize the damage caused by Covid-19 over the past year. But I think cardiovascular diseases probably killed more police officers over the past year.
Had a friend from college who became a police officer. He probably would have survived COVID-19 if he could've waited a week before going to the hospital. He certainly went along with getting ventilated because he believed the doctors knew what they were doing. Ventilations fell off a cliff a week later (in April 2020) when the doctors started to ignore the official guidelines for COVID-19.
Whatever happened to those ventilators that President Trump ordered? None of them got used, because front line doctors figured out that following the official guidance to ventilate their patients ASAP were death sentences.
My LEO-friend is certainly listed as a COVID-19 fatality, not an iatrogenic one. Inconvenient for the powers that be to consider that he was medically deteriorated with ventilation & oxygenation.
Oxygen is known to be toxic [0], but modern doctors seem to just figure "what else can we do, when the patient's oxygen saturation level crashes?" (because their training doesn't cover the antidote that makes supplemental oxygen non-toxic).
The technical terms for damage done to lungs with ventilators is barotrauma. Sometimes ventilation is justified for short duration [surgery, etc]. Ventilation has never been found helpful for pneumonia.
I'm trying to coin Medical Hyperventilation as a term of art [1]. My term hasn't taken off yet, but the science is entirely settled about everything in my writeup.
[1] The folly of medical hyperventilation - https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat... (I've since figured out how Medicine was tricked into no longer using the antidote for oxygen toxicity. The turning point from science-based oxygenation to our modern science-free practice was in 1955.)
Thanks for the feedback. I am not overly familiar with ventilation protocols, I just understand that some ventilation strategies are more aggressive than others. I will edit to clarify.
Why would you make any claims about medical practice without understanding the 5 minute basics?
You talk about refusing ventilation to survive hospitalization, but your whole premise (toxicity of pure oxygen) has nothing to do with modern medical practice!
My premise is that any amount of supplemental oxygen without the antidote for oxygen toxicity worsens outcomes. For example, I mentioned how doctors are realizing that COPD patients don't necessarily benefit from supplemental oxygen.
(Edit: editing my piece I understood what you meant. I have reworded that opening paragraph to say "Modern doctors sometimes decide their patient's tissues are low on oxygen and prescribe various amounts of supplemental oxygen.")
> modern medical practice!
Aggressive use of oxygenation has been studied and is consistently found to worsens patient outcomes [0]. There should be no controversy, but aggressive oxygenation is a common treatment in modern medical practice. Maybe you know why this is the case?
LEO isn’t in the top 10 of the life threatening profession list in US, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-i.... I’d wager COVID was also the #1 killer of retail clerks, florists, and probably software engineers for the last two years as well.