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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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The US has around 3.5M deaths per year, 112K/3.5M=.32% of all deaths, pretty straightforward.

3.2%

EDIT:

Also, looking at the graph, on first glance it looks like overdose deaths spiked during Covid lockdown, and are already dropping quickly.

Are we looking at the same graph (Figure 1a. 12 Month-ending Provisional Counts of Drug Overdose Deaths: United States)? That apparent downward trend has the note "Underreported due to incomplete data", and the predicted value of deaths is holding steady at 110-112k.

EDIT2: @guesswho (do pings work in edits?)

EDIT: Looks like I screwed up the math and chart stuff and it's all kind of weird. CDC says drug overdose is .32% of deaths, but that doesn't jive with their listed number of deaths in 2023, off by an order of magnitude. I'm wondering if deaths have more than one listed cause, or if some set of these numbers are projections or something.

Still not sure where you're getting .32% from. From their first paragraph, 0.032% (32.4 per 100,000) of people died of overdose deaths (mostly opioid) in 2021. If you round it off to 1/100 people dying each year, it adds up to 3% of deaths.

I'm looking at this graph which runs from 1999 to 2021 and depicts a terrifying rising trend.