Im kinda tired of refuting the misinterpretation of the data presented by Briand and subsequently the Johns Hopkins newletter article. But here goes. Influenza went down 80 or 90 percent temporarily because people became fanatical about hygiene for a year. Influenza deaths went down from 10,000 to around 1000 because every flu like symptom in elderly people was treated as a life threatening illness. That says more about the way doctors treat influenza in the elderly in a typical year than anything else. Influenza is completely cureable in everyone who is not literally on the verge of death. Its also useful to know that influenza typically does not hit more than 4 or 5 states in a year. Every state has a bad flu year every 8 or 10 years, when immunity begins to wane in that area. So whether flu hits is rather stochastic and regional which is why its not that weird that no state had a bad flu year. Most years, most states do not have a bad flu year. What would be weird is if no states had a bad flu year for 4 or 5 years. Basically some states who have not had bad flu in several years have effectively “put off” a flu outbreak for a year. You will now see a higher number of states have bad flu as several states “catch up” with immunity. Heart failure and stroke are not down. They are up. All deaths are way up by about 20 percent over the last year and a half. Some of these “excess” deaths were attributed to covid about 2/3 or so. But the rest of these “excess” deaths were attributed to a rise in heart attacks and strokes, death from dementia in the elderly. It was never explained why we had a huge increase in deaths by “normal” causes. Thats because these were actually covid deaths that occured in nursing homes but were explained away as heart attacks etc. for fear of lawsuits. That’s right— they didn’t overestimate covid deaths, they underestimated them. The Johns Hopkins article showed cardiac and stroke going down as a proportion of primary cause of death. The NUMBER of cardiac deaths did not go down. They went down as a proportion of a larger “death pie”. Some graphics in that presentation were not explained properly so I feel many were misled if they didn’t actual look at how those metrics were calculated. I encourage people to read the Briand presentation more carefully and look at what those charts actually represent. The mean average life expectancy is not the mode average life expectancy. The US and many other white countries have a mean life expectancy of around 78, where as the median and mode average life expectancies are much higher. The most common (mode) age at death is NOT 78 but around 88. Thats because the life expectancy distribution is negatively skewed and not a bell curve. These things matter. If your mean age of death is 78 and suddenly all 78 year old die or are killed, your mean life expectancy drops below 78. Do you understand why that happens? Your mean life expectancy at 0 is 78, but your mean life expectancy at 78 is not 78. Its much higher. You are the 20th person to put this argument to me and it shows that you haven’t thought about how the death distribution works. Look up mean, mode, median, skew, distribution. If you are over 50 or 60 and you inhale a lot of this virus there is no amount of healthy living that will save you if you don’t get serious medical intervention like an antiviral. Theoretically, even a very young fit person will die of covid if they inhale a large amount of virus. That is why some young people are dying of the vaccine. Its the spike protein that is doing the most damage and it doesn’t matter much if its attached to a living virus or not. Young people are highly unlikely to inhale huge amounts of virus sufficient to kill them in a normal human environment. But anyone can die from breathing in enough aeresolize sars cov 2. Its a bioweapon. People who were only exposed to small amounts of the virus may convince themselves that its just the flu and they have a super healthy immune system. But health/age is just one factor. Quantity of virus at exposure is another. None of this objective information indicates my political position on masks or vaccines or lockdowns. Its just the facts as I see them. Covid is a fairly serious disease that has killed a few million people prematurely and some very prematurely. I think Ive discussed the facts relating to masks amply in other comments on this post. Mask can absolutely be proven to be useful in some situations and not others. Its an issue of physics. If you want me to show you where you are wrong in determining that masks have no benefit in any situation, please cite the “mask study” of your choosing and I will show you how you have misinterpreted it.