At this point in the pandemic, most of us have looked at Worldometer. It’s an incredibly interesting site. According to its data, there have been 73,188,395 cases of coronavirus with 1,627,783 deaths. This year there have also been:
2,577, 294 new books titles published
848,153,501 (and counting) people who are undernourished
1,703,186,167 (and counting) overweight people
468,162 deaths from flu
1,606,732 AIDS/HIV deaths
40,692,940 (and counting) abortions
1,024,921 suicides
$382,357,550,093 (and counting) have been spent on drugs.
If you haven’t ever gone to the Worldometer site, I highly recommend it. Watch it for a few minutes and notice which numbers change in that time, how quickly they scroll along. It’s mind boggling.
The numbers for COVID are shocking, but so are some of these other numbers. All that money spent on drugs. How many deaths do those dollars equal? According to numerous reports, 2020 deaths by overdose will exceed those in 2019, which equalled almost 72,000.
It takes a long time to get accurate counts on overdose numbers so even the 2019 numbers may be revised, but the preliminary data for 2020 looks bleak. Drug related deaths are up by 17% in NJ, 30% in Colorado, 23% in California, and 60% in Delaware. In Philadelphia, there were 582 drug related deaths between January and June. Last year, 1,150 people died of unintentional drug overdoses in Philly.
Also of note, as of December 13, there have been 470 homicides in Philly, an increase of 39% from 2019.