"Covid is gone. But people keep dying. Why?
Unsurprisingly, Ryan did not mention mRNA vaccines anywhere. Why would he? Doing so would only make for headaches he and Service Corporation do not need.
But, earlier in the call, he did point to “more cancer deaths” and more broadly a decline in overall health:
We believe these excess services are more permanent in nature into a combination of aging demographics, higher risk, less healthy lifestyle developed during the pandemic.
Ryan also suggested delayed medical care might be an issue.
These explanations are… strained, at best. Aging demographics are hardly new, and the lockdowns that drove a “less healthy lifestyle” ended as early as mid-2020 in most red states and by early 2021 almost everywhere. Opioids and overdoses generally remain a horrendous crisis, but deaths appear to have peaked in early 2022 and fallen slightly since. And for all the discussion of delays in medical care, hospitals and doctors offices have functioned essentially normally for at least 18 months.
In any case, the United States is hardly alone in seeing a large and so far unexplained spike in deaths in 2022."
